Infrastructure work teaches you to respect complexity. Product work teaches you to decide what the person using the system should never have to see.
A different kind of problem
Most of my professional work starts with a live environment, a service that matters and a set of constraints that cannot be wished away. Sort All Money starts somewhere different: with a problem that needs to be made clearer before it can be made technical.
That change of starting point is useful. It forces me to ask what the person actually needs to understand, what can be removed, and which decisions should feel obvious instead of becoming another piece of admin.
Simple on the surface
A good product can look calm even when there is real work behind it. The interface should give people a clear next step; the system underneath still needs careful boundaries, honest states, sensible failure behaviour and changes that can be tested.
That is where the side project overlaps with infrastructure. The technologies are different, but the standard is familiar: make the important path understandable, keep recovery in mind, and do not promise more than the system can support.
Good technical work is often the work that makes the difficult parts feel unsurprising.
Infrastructure instincts
Building something independently also makes the full lifecycle visible. There is no separate team to hand the awkward edges to. Requirements, copy, interface decisions, deployment, health checks, security choices and supportability all meet in the same place.
That is a useful discipline. It keeps the product close to the problem and keeps the engineering honest. It also gives me a space to practise communicating technical decisions in a way that starts with the person affected by them.
What comes next
Sort All Money is still an independent product project. The public site is the best place to see where it is going; this note is the reasoning behind why I keep building it alongside infrastructure work.
If you want to see the product itself, visit Sort All Money. If you want to talk about infrastructure services, delivery or operations, get in touch.