For the Past Year, JAMARQ Has Been Building

The quiet wasn't idleness

If you've followed JAMARQ anywhere online, you've probably noticed it's been quiet. That wasn't because nothing was happening. Nearly all of the time went into the work itself, and almost none went into showing it.

For anyone who doesn't know: JAMARQ is a one-person technology business based in Winston-Salem, NC. I'm Jason. I build and maintain websites and the admin systems behind them, write software, and, more recently, fix computers. Customers from anywhere are welcome; most of the work so far has been close to home.

What the year held

Over the past year JAMARQ built websites for seven businesses: a music venue, a restaurant, a container rental company and its trade wing, a junk removal company, a dog grooming spa and a shopping center. Some of those replaced sites that couldn't do the job. Some replaced nothing at all.

In September, six of those sites moved to a new platform. The goal was that the businesses' customers wouldn't notice, and they didn't. That move is the most careful piece of engineering JAMARQ did all year, and nobody outside it would have known it happened.

Alongside the client work there was software: a bootable drive that diagnoses a computer's hardware without touching the owner's files, a desktop app that rebuilds playlists across music services, and a long list of internal tools. There was a lot of learning, most of it because a project needed it. There were ideas that didn't pan out and were dropped. And this fall, JAMARQ started taking on PC repair and tech support.

Some of that worked. Some didn't. A few things got much bigger than planned, and a few were abandoned entirely.

Why talk about it now

The honest reason is that a business can get very good at making things without getting any better at telling people it makes them. JAMARQ did exactly that. Capability went up. Visibility stayed about where it started.

So this week is a reintroduction. Each day there's a short post on social media and a longer note here.

Tuesday is the websites: three of the client projects in some detail, and the platform move behind them. Wednesday is the software, and why most of it started with the same thought, that there has to be a better way to do this. Thursday is what didn't work, which is the most useful part of the year. Friday is what JAMARQ is now, including the PC repair side.

What this isn't

It isn't an announcement of something big, and it isn't a victory lap. JAMARQ is still small, and most of the work still comes from the businesses it started with. The point is simpler: here's what's actually been built, here's what was learned, and here's what JAMARQ can do now.

JAMARQ is a very different business than it was a year ago. It's probably time it was introduced properly.