A Lot Has Been Going On

Over the last year or so, MX Web Solutions has changed quite a bit.

Not in the sense that I suddenly decided to do something completely different. If anything, it happened in the opposite way: I kept following little ideas, experimenting with new technologies, and seeing where they led.

For years, most of my work revolved around websites. That’s still a huge part of what I do, but somewhere along the way I started becoming much more interested in building products of my own.

The first real step in that direction was HexDrop.

It began partly as an experiment. I wanted to get more comfortable building native apps and explore what I could make outside the usual web stack. That turned into a real macOS app, which led to QRDev, and suddenly this wasn't just something I was trying on the side anymore. I genuinely enjoyed making small, focused products.

Then a friend said something along the lines of:

“You should make a game.”

So, naturally, I did.

Or at least I started trying.

That first experiment became ChromaChain, a puzzle game prototype I initially built in the browser. It was much more ambitious than anything I'd attempted up to that point, and I quickly realized that if I wanted to build the game I had in my head, I needed a lot more practice.

So I came up with a smaller idea.

The concept was simple: a little guy orbiting planets, switching directions, diving between orbits, avoiding enemies. Something compact enough that I could use it to learn game development without disappearing into a multi-year project.

That “practice game” became Orbit Drive.

And somewhere around there, things changed.

Orbit Drive became a finished game. ChromaChain kept growing. More ideas appeared. I started thinking about interfaces, animation, sound, progression systems and native development in ways I simply hadn't needed to before.

I haven't really looked back since.

That evolution eventually became MX Labs — a home for the apps, games and experiments I was building alongside my client work.

What surprised me is how much the two sides started feeding into each other.

Building apps and games has changed how I think about websites. I've become much more interested in interaction, performance, small details, custom interfaces and choosing technology based on what a project actually needs rather than defaulting to the same solution every time.

At the same time, years of designing and building for clients gave me a foundation I could carry into the products: understanding users, simplifying interfaces, knowing when something is getting unnecessarily complicated, and ultimately getting things out the door.

Which brings me to this website.

The previous MXWS site was increasingly becoming a snapshot of what the business used to be. The work had moved forward, but the site hadn't really moved with it.

So I rebuilt it.

The new MXWS is still very much about helping businesses create better things on the web, but it now leaves room for a much broader idea of what those things can be — websites, apps, experiments, custom digital tools and whatever else makes sense for the problem.

And there’s quite a bit more I want to share.

That’s partly what Side Notes is for. Not a content machine or a carefully optimized corporate blog. Just a place for project stories, experiments, things I’ve learned, and occasional notes about what I’m building next.

Because apparently, there’s been a lot going on.