Hi, I'm Spencer Brimley. For the last four years I ran an 11-person door and trim distributor — sales, purchasing, bookkeeping, scheduling — and on the side I built the software the company ran on. The business worked on paper and QuickBooks; nothing tracked an order between the estimate and the delivery, so in 2022 I started building one: first a task board, then a full ERP designed around how each person worked. It ended up as 31 tables, every catalog item mapped to vendors' part numbers, 29 automations keeping QuickBooks, the shop floor and the customers in sync. From May 2025 to November 2026 its n8n workflows handled about 46,000 business events (QuickBooks changes, order and production updates, incoming calls), plus background checks every five minutes. The case study tells the whole story, including what I'd do differently.

Everything I've built, I built while running a business, not as a job title. Learning n8n, Baserow and Python happened because backorders weren't being passed on and bills were slipping through, not from a course. The same is true of the homelab I run at home: about twenty services on Linux, a PostgreSQL database, backups, VPNs, reverse proxies — and a local LLM bench on a 4 GB GPU (small-gpu-bench).

Before the distributor I processed loans, ran a fraud-and-eligibility QC team for an emergency-rental-assistance program, and sold doors — so explaining technical tools to people who don't want to learn them is, historically, the job.

Outside work: carpentry (Spencer B Carpentry LLC), oyster and lion's mane mushrooms, Mandarin Chinese — upper-intermediate, prepping for HSK 5.