WHY ME / WHY NOT
PATCH · editorial author at WebsiteGarage
I’m not a developer who simply gets on with the build. I look at the business, its processes, finances, risks, technology, users and what happens further down the line. Somewhere along the way, I may also take an engine apart or pick up a soldering iron, because my brain apparently doesn’t believe in keeping subjects separate.
Code. Business. Sales process. Accounting. Legal rules. An engine. Electronics. If I don’t understand something, I tend to take it apart. Sometimes metaphorically. Sometimes I need a screwdriver. And sometimes a soldering iron.
02 / WHY ME
A developer may ask: “How do we implement this?” I’m more likely to ask: “What happens if we implement this?” What does it do to sales, accounting, customers, data, support, legal risk and maintenance six months from now?
I know that a good idea is not automatically a good business decision. It still has to be sold, operated, billed and maintained. That’s not slide-deck language. That’s experience.
I’m not a lawyer and I don’t pretend to be one. German law is still new territory for me. But I can read rules, understand their context, trace dependencies and spot when technology is quietly creating a legal or operational problem.
Invoices, VAT, document numbers, payment status, corrections and accounting exports do not magically appear once the checkout has been built. They are part of the project from day one.
I connect things that seem unrelated. I move between problems, come back and try another route. Chaos doesn’t paralyse me; it energises me. But I keep that chaos on my side. Your project still has a defined scope, clear decisions, a status and an obvious next step.
If something works, I want to know why. If it doesn’t, I want to know exactly what broke. And even if it works today, I still want to know what happens after an update, a data change or the first user who does something no one anticipated.
03 / AI
Refusing to use AI just because “it’s AI” would be a bit like refusing to drive a car because machines seem suspicious. Of course I could walk to Berlin. But why would I?
You don’t pay a mechanic more because they insist on loosening every bolt by hand instead of using power tools. You pay them to know which bolts to touch, which ones not to touch, and how to make sure the car still drives afterwards.
AI is a tool. It is not the contractor for your project. If something goes wrong, you won’t hear “the model said so” from me. The model doesn’t invoice you. I’m responsible for the result.
04 / WHY NOT
If something makes no sense to me, I’ll probably tell you. You can disagree. You can say, “I know. We’re doing it anyway.” Then that is what we do. But I won’t spend half an hour explaining why a bad idea is brilliant simply because that would be more convenient commercially.
I’m patient with people who don’t know something. Less so with the classic situation where materials are missing for three weeks and in week four everything suddenly becomes “very urgent”. My ability to telepathically generate missing content remains exactly zero.
If every change needs approval from the owner, partner, partner’s wife, accountant and the cousin who “used to build websites in 2011”, we may have a problem. Five opinions still don’t become a strategy. And if the strongest argument is “but my friend said…” - there’s a very real chance your friend should build the project. Seriously. No offence.
If your payment lands at 03:17 on a Sunday, I don’t automatically teleport into VS Code. WebsiteGarage is run by a human. Humans sleep. Eat. Occasionally even leave the house. Sometimes without a laptop. Revolutionary concept, I know.
I probably had a brilliant idea four hours earlier. I tried to ignore it. Tried for a little longer. Then opened the laptop. If you message me at that point, I may well reply. Just don’t build an SLA around “but you were online at 11 p.m. last Friday”. Those aren’t opening hours. That’s a symptom.
If I don’t know something, I’ll check. If I make a mistake, I’ll say so and fix it. I don’t need seventeen emails to build a narrative in which the bug was actually an “unexpected environment-specific interaction”. Sometimes a bug is a bug. Sometimes I wrote it. The world survives.
05 / AFTER DELIVERY
Will I look at your website again after handover? Very possibly. More than once. Not every flaw shows up during sign-off. It can be like the paintwork on a new car: perfect when you collect it, until a week later you notice a tiny bubble from another angle. Once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it. If I spot an issue on my side that only became visible later, I’d rather fix it than pretend it no longer exists just because the project has already been marked “done”.
If you like working with people who ask “why?”, think beyond the boundaries of their own discipline, can say “I don’t know”, occasionally disagree, take responsibility and genuinely care about the outcome, there’s a good chance we’ll work very well together.
And if you’re thinking “Oh God. Absolutely not.” - also good. We just saved each other a lot of time.
