I'm Max. I write software for businesses that make things.
Not demos and not decks. Systems that people open on a Monday morning and complain about loudly when they are wrong — which is the only useful kind of feedback there is.
The short version
- Where
- Kingston, Ontario
- Day job
- Internal systems at a manufacturer here in Kingston
- Business
- Global Web Rise — sole proprietorship, my name on the invoice
- Capacity
- Two client projects at a time
- In person
- Belleville to Brockville. Elsewhere in Ontario, we start on a call
Where the opinions on this site come from
By day I run the internal systems at a manufacturer here in Kingston. Their orders, quotes, customers, materials, stock and accounting all pass through software I built, including the sync into their books and the tooling behind their online store. I still maintain it every week, which is a different and more honest relationship with a codebase than shipping it and leaving.
That is where almost everything on this site comes from. I am not describing software I have read about. I have watched people on a shop floor use it in a hurry, break it in ways nobody designed for, and then tell me exactly what was wrong with it — usually while holding something heavy.
Outside that I build and run my own things. BenefitCheck.ca is mine: a benefits calculator for people in Ontario, with card payments, transactional email and monitoring behind it, which I operate rather than having built once and walked away from. I also built a private tool that finds and verifies business contacts, which I use for my own outreach and do not sell.
Global Web Rise is the registered business name on the invoice. In practice you are dealing with one engineer. I work with a designer on branding, interface work and content — she is not named here yet because that is her decision to make, not mine — and I take a small enough number of projects that you are never waiting behind somebody else's emergency.
The risk was never that the software fails. It is that it becomes something only one person understands.
Max Zimak
Four habits, and where each one came from.
Write it down before building it
Almost every disagreement in this work is about scope, and scope is cheap to fix on paper and expensive to fix in code.
So you get the plan first: what it does on day one, and what it deliberately does not do.
Ship narrow
Something small that gets used on Monday beats something enormous that lands in six months and matches a conversation nobody remembers having.
The second version is always better than the first, so get to the first one quickly.
Say when it isn't custom software
A good share of what I am asked to build should be a setting, a connector, or a written-down process.
Saying so costs me a project. It has also been how most of my conversations start.
Everything in your name
Accounts, domain, code, data. From day one, not at the end as a favour.
If leaving me is expensive, I am no longer competing on the quality of the work.
Businesses where work arrives, moves, and leaves.
Five to fifty people, one or two owners, not a corporation. Small manufacturers and workshops, e-commerce businesses that make what they sell, distributors, and contractors with an office.
The common thread is that a job comes in, passes through stages, and goes out — and that somewhere in the middle of it, a person is doing by hand what a machine should be doing. If that describes your week, we will get on.
- Size
- Five to fifty people, one or two owners
- Kind
- Manufacturers and workshops, e-commerce that makes what it sells, distributors, contractors with an office
- The tell
- A job arrives, passes through stages, and leaves — and a person is doing part of it by hand
- Less useful to
- Pre-revenue startups, agencies reselling my hours, anyone who needs a team of six
Let me look at how your business runs.
The audit is free and does not need a phone call. Worst case, you get a written second opinion on your own operation for nothing.