burnz.work
The site that started as a portfolio and got more useful when it stopped acting like one.
visit project ↗the problem
A pile of unrelated-looking repos, experiments, music, art, business ideas, and research does not explain itself. a normal portfolio made the work look cleaner and the person behind it less coherent.
what i built
A public operating record organized around work, lab, studio, current attention, killed projects, and increasingly the actual process behind each repo rather than polished case-study theater.
current state
Very much active. the architecture is stable enough now that the work is shifting from rearranging categories to adding evidence, artifacts, and the stories hidden in the commit history.
the portfolio that stopped being a portfolio.
this repo started as an attempt to put a lot of unrelated-looking work in one place. the first version organized it. the later commits started answering the harder question: why does the same person keep making all of this?
first, make the mess navigable.
the initial build created Work, Lab, Studio, Now, About, and Graveyard around structured project records. that solved information architecture, but it still felt like a tasteful portfolio somebody else could have owned.
the site got better when AI stopped being the identity.
the homepage was rebuilt around the operator-to-builder story: real business friction first, AI as implementation leverage, Barter as the live experiment, three selected projects, a method section, and current attention instead of a generic activity feed.
clean architecture was not enough.
the soul pass loosened the copy, added from-the-desk notes, Gulf Coast texture, dry self-owns, and more explicit dealership roots without turning the site into a personal blog.
afterSHIFT stopped looking like burnz.work.
the first serious case study reconstructed a project from its repo history, then the page itself was reskinned to borrow the project's own visual language. that became the rule for deeper case files: burnz is the frame, but a substantial project gets to take over inside it.
now the repos are turning into stories instead of links.
the next layer is this case-file system: not a changelog, not a fake agency case study, but the decisions, wrong turns, constraints, and artifacts that explain how each build actually happened.