Ya got me, universe. You really did. I was having a blast just cruising on looks and charm, but here we are: me in 2025, actually putting effort into business. Wild, right? Three and a half years since I last showed up here, and now I’ve rolled in with a shiny new presence that took way more elbow grease than I wanted to give (honesty hour: I grumbled the whole time). But hey, times change. Yesterday’s gone, tomorrow’s coming, and I’d rather not repeat The Stupid™.
Back then, three and a half years ago, I was deep in CartThrob land. Like, up to my eyeballs in support requests, working with devs every day, and honestly? I loved it. After the VITY rollercoaster, getting paid to focus on software and help people felt like winning the lottery. But then I got ambitious. “I’ve got free time, let’s grow something!” Spoiler: I did… but I also let my brand vanish.
Sure, I was still writing, speaking, building Add-ons, and taking on clients. But it was scattered; stuff on third-party sites, freebies tossed out into the void, and client work tucked away under NDAs. Basically, invisible. And yeah, that was dumb.
So now? I’m fixing it. New site, new branding, new(ish) colors, and yes, even some sparkle dazzle (patent pending). All me. Built, maintained, and polished by yours truly. With actual effort. Buckle up, because this means I need to unload what the last few years have been about.
CartThrob
Yeah. 4 Years I worked with CartThrob. And I LOVED it. Mad respect to Foster Made, and specifically, Shawn Maeda who was in charge of the direction and whom took a chance on a broken dev when I needed a hand. I was in charge of implementation, but Shawn dictated priorities and what was done, and we made a legit team in every way a dev could want.
During that time, I saw CartThrob go from the clunky and weird UI of ExpressionEngine 5 (with CartThrob 5) all the way through to its current glory as the premier shopping cart Add-on for ExpressionEngine at CartThrob 8.1. More than that though, was my involvement with quite a few other CartThrob Add-ons, like Subscriptions, Seeder, Fees, and, well, kinda all of them if we're being honest.
A very fun time I look back on fondly now that CartThrob has a new owner with Packet Tide.
ExpressionEngine
Anyone who's followed along knows I'm a big "tend your garden" type of developer. I use ExpressionEngine, my clients rely on ExpressionEngine, therefore it's in my best interests to ensure ExpressionEngine kicks ass. Which is why I'm a proud contributor to ExpressionEngine, having provided over a dozen Pull Requests free of charge over the last three and a half years.
To date, I've contributed both big and small changes to ExpressionEngine ranging from the small, of fixing the Control Panel Member Avatar layer, to adding an entire object layer for generating Shared Forms, new hooks for extensibility for Add-ons, and even redesigning how Add-ons are created and executed, to quite a few more. While all were certainly started from my own personal issues and problems, they've all been well received and adopted by the ExpressionEngine team and community. Which is nice.
Add-ons
With Add-ons, I sometimes can't help muhself... an idea will hit, or a client request comes in that can be abstracted, or hell, I can just be bored and see someone needing "a thing". That's how it happens folks. No real mystery. End result being useful tools for web developers and their clients.
To be honest, I have a whole Projects section worth checking out if you're curious about the Add-on situation.
Client Work
This was the real fun. A variety of projects and tasks, all with different people and styles, all interesting and unique in their own ways. I worked on ExpressionEngine (of course), but also quite a few custom Laravel and Craft CMS sites as well. I worked with the Chat GPT API and the Google Pay and Amazon Pay APIs. Had clients within government sectors and commercial. Everything from making simple and basic changes to fully custom ExpressionEngine Add-ons and Craft CMS Plugins and full fledged custom PHP applications.
While decorum prevents me from naming names, the names aren't the point; I had a lot of fun working with clients. Big fan of the whole process and I look forward to what's coming on the client work front.
The Point
I got busy. Like… really busy. When I dusted off mithra62 in 2022, I thought it’d be a big deal. But once the client work train started rolling, it didn’t stop. I didn’t have to worry about branding or professionalism because, frankly, the work kept coming. But now it’s 2025, everything’s expensive, and it’s time to level up. Again.
Also, confession time: I made this way harder than it needed to be. I thought, “Hey, let’s cram in all my old blog posts too!” which would’ve been fine… except my last one was from 2022. And it’s 2025. Oof. So here I am, owning it.
I was busy, okay? Leave me alone.