Musings

Since 2022 my shop has run on four different ERPs. The first one we outgrew. The second was a full enterprise suite that took five months and a pile of money to not work. The third was an industry package that did most of what we needed and none of it the way we actually work.

The fourth one I built. Not from scratch, and not by writing code. I took Odoo, sat down with AI, and configured, customized, and connected it until it matched how a print and embroidery shop really moves an order from inbox to shipping dock.

I can't explain how most of the code works. I didn't write it. What I do know is my business, well enough to know exactly how the software should behave. That turned out to be the part that mattered.

I wrote the whole story up as a book, Stop Working for Your Software. And for the part of me that still has opinions about the first three systems, there's ERP Hell.

I want a trading system that runs without me staring at it. The goal is compounding, with a floor under the downside. That second part is where most people skip steps.

So the plan runs in phases, and nothing jumps ahead. First a backtesting harness, so every idea gets tested against history and against dumb baselines. Then paper trading, so it has to survive a market it hasn't seen. Only after that do I decide whether it touches real money, and even then it starts with an amount I can afford to lose.

If a strategy can't beat buy-and-hold on paper, it doesn't get a vote.

I'll log what I learn on /trades, including the ideas that don't work. Those are most of them.

Read it backwards. A pissant is somebody small and insignificant, the guy nobody worries about.

I like that. Small shops, small owners and small ideas get underestimated all the time, and it's the best head start there is. Nobody's watching, so you can try things. Ants also carry about fifty times their own weight, which I'd argue is the more important fact.

So this is my pissant corner of the internet. It's the home base for the sites I run, the stuff I'm building, and my trades.