James L. Cowan Jr.

3 min read

I am James. Founder and product engineer, born in Napa, California, and still absurdly proud to be American.

The honest version is that I build entire products by myself because I cannot stand not understanding how my own things work. The product, the code, the servers it runs on, the way it reaches you. Most people are content to own one piece of the machine and let the rest stay a mystery, and that has always felt unbearable to me. If I do not understand a thing down to the studs, I do not really own it. I am just renting.

Doing all of it alone is not the right move for everyone, and I understand why. It is slower in the boring ways, and it is a genuinely stupid amount of work. But I would rather be the kind of person who can build and hold every part of a thing than move fast on rails someone else laid down. That is what this is really about for me. Control. Full control of my software, my brands, my products. And the strange thing about owning all your own tools is that they keep paying you back. Each one you build quietly becomes the start of the next one, so the more of it you own, the more you can do with it.

I think that is really just first principles wearing a different outfit. Rick Rubin, in The Creative Act, keeps stripping a song down until only what actually matters is left, and to me that is the whole game. Start from what is true, throw out everything you only inherited, and build back up from there. Most of modern work is inherited. Very little of it is true.

I should say, under all the sarcasm, that I genuinely care about people. That part is not a bit. I have come to think that software made by one person who actually gives a damn is one of the last honest ways to be useful to strangers at scale, and I would like to spend my life proving it.

Why this exists

I live in Obsidian. Most of my real thinking already sits in a graph of notes that grows sideways instead of scrolling past, and for a long time all of it stayed private.

I have never been photogenic enough to build in public on YouTube, beyond the odd post on X pointing back here. But the idea of learning in public kept nagging at me anyway. Not the polished, finished version of the work, but the actual thinking, the half formed notes, the parts most people quietly delete. So I decided to publish the graph itself, partly as an experiment and partly because it felt like something worth sharing with friends, family, and the occasional stranger who stumbles in.

American builders have always had a habit of making the impossible look inevitable, usually while smarter people explain why it cannot be done. I take an enormous amount of pride in that lineage, and I intend to add to it, ideally before the republic finishes speedrunning the fall of Rome.

Reach me

If any of this resonates, say hello or come see what I am building.

Graph View