Behind the Tool
BUILT BY
CURIOSITY.
FUELED BY
EXPERIENCE.
Twenty years in tech will teach you one thing above all else: the technology is never really the point. The people using it always are. This site exists at that intersection — where good tools, good food, and genuine curiosity about how we all navigate the digital world come together.
The person behind it
TWO DECADES IN THE MACHINE
I’ve spent two decades working inside and alongside the tech industry — through the rise of social media, the mobile revolution, the age of big data, and now the AI era that’s rewriting everything again. Throughout all of it, my fixation has stayed the same: how do real people actually use this stuff?
Not the press releases. Not the analyst decks. The actual behavior — how consumers discover things, decide things, and share things. The gap between what technology promises and what people do with it is where I’ve always found the most interesting work.
I care about digital trends the way some people care about sports stats. I track shifts in search behavior, watch how new AI tools get adopted (and abandoned), and pay close attention to the moments when a new platform genuinely changes how people move through the world. This site is an extension of that — a place where that thinking gets put to practical use.
Under the hood
HOW THIS SITE WAS BUILT
I built the Happy Hour Finder as a real-world experiment: what happens when you let AI do the heavy lifting on a tool that actually solves a problem people have? The answer turned out to be — a lot, faster than I expected.
The core stack is intentionally lean. No frameworks, no build pipeline, no database. Just a single HTML file, a Yelp Fusion API integration, and a conversation with Claude that iterated the whole thing from scratch in an afternoon.
Claude (Anthropic)
The entire app was designed, written, and iterated through conversation. No manual coding — just direction, feedback, and refinement.
Yelp Fusion API
Powers the restaurant search — filtering by happy hour attribute, location, cuisine category, and menu availability.
Browser Geolocation
The Near Me filter uses the native Geolocation API to search by coordinates and radius rather than city name.
Vanilla HTML/JS
No React, no bundler. A single file that opens in any browser, works offline, and can be bookmarked with your API key baked in.
The most interesting part of building this wasn’t the code — it was watching how AI handles iterative product thinking. Feature by feature, filter by filter, the tool got smarter through dialogue rather than through traditional development cycles. That process itself is something worth writing more about.
What’s coming
EDITORIAL, OBSERVATIONS & HONEST TAKES
Beyond the finder tool, this is a place for thinking out loud about technology, consumer behavior, and the changing landscape of how we discover the world around us. Expect no hype, no sponsored takes — just twenty years of pattern recognition applied to things that are actually happening right now.
AI COMPARISONS
Side-by-side looks at how different AI tools — Claude, GPT, Gemini, and others — handle real tasks. Not benchmarks. Real use cases.
TRENDS
What’s actually shifting in consumer behavior, search patterns, and digital adoption — and what’s just noise masquerading as a trend.
SEARCH & DISCOVERY
How people find things is changing faster than it ever has. AI search, zero-click results, local intent — this stuff matters and most coverage misses the point.
TOOLS IN THE WILD
Honest observations on how new tech tools actually get used — and misused — by real consumers, not early adopters.
If you’ve spent any time genuinely curious about how technology shapes behavior — not as an abstraction, but in the small daily decisions people make about where to eat, what to search for, which app to trust — then you’re exactly who I built this for.
The Happy Hour Finder is just the beginning. Enjoy the drinks. More observations to follow.