This is a retrospective — part of an honest back-catalog project where I write up the eras of the career as they actually happened. The work is from 2013–2020; the writing is from now, with the benefit of knowing how it all turned out.

From 2013 to 2020 I was a software developer and then project lead at a shop in Fargo, North Dakota, and a large slice of that work was native mobile: Java on Android, iOS beside it, and the special flavor of pain called real-time GPS tracking — fleets, routes, location-based services for businesses that measured their day in miles.

GPS teaches you distributed systems whether you asked or not

A phone reporting its position sounds simple until you meet the truck that drives through a dead zone for forty minutes and then uploads its entire buffered history at once, out of order, on a flaky connection, twice. Every hard lesson I now apply to web work — idempotent writes, queues that tolerate replays, timestamps you can trust versus timestamps the device made up — I learned first from vehicles moving through North Dakota’s cellular geography.

The rule that survived: design for the gap, not the connection. The happy path is a demo; the dropout is the product.

AWS from the ground up, before that was normal

We stood up cloud infrastructure when the standard question was still “why not a server in the closet?” Building highly available backends for mobile fleets on early AWS meant learning capacity planning, health checks, and what actually happens during a failover — not from a certification course but from a pager. (The certifications came later; the scar tissue was first.)

The rule that survived: infrastructure is a product feature. Users never see it, and they feel it constantly.

Project lead in a small market means you do the whole job

In Fargo you’re not a specialist in a hundred-person org; you’re the person who scopes it, builds it, ships it, and answers the phone about it. Client communication wasn’t a department — it was Tuesday. That’s where the published-prices instinct on this studio’s services page comes from: seven years of watching what happens to trust when the number arrives late.

The rule that survived: the person you call should be the person who ships. It’s on the services page today because it was true in Fargo first.

What it adds up to

Mobile taught the distributed-systems reflexes, AWS taught the infrastructure respect, and the small market taught the honesty. When the rescue practice picks up a site whose GPS integration or legacy .NET backend scares everyone else off — this era is why it doesn’t scare me.

More retrospectives as the back-catalog fills in. The Fargo page explains what the homecoming means in practice.