Field Report Fredericksburg, Virginia

Nothing is done because the build succeeded.

I design, build, deploy, and host web projects end to end — then I check that they actually work. Comfortable owning the whole stack, and comfortable on a team that splits it.

Subject
Sean Stanley
Discipline
Full-stack web development & creative technology
Estate
50+ production sites, self-managed on Linux
Practice
Cosmic Builders · 2021 – present
Focus
Next.js applications, real-time audio, WebGL, and the servers under them
The Standardwhy this page
is a report

Six years of insurance inspection taught me that a report is worth exactly what the walk-through was worth.

From 2018 to 2024 I owned an inspection company. Carriers and agents paid me to go look at things other people had already signed off on — interior and exterior condition, and specialty work like pre-shipment reports on exotic cars before they went on a truck. Several hundred inspections, about twenty-five carriers and agencies on the roster.

The job was never the paperwork. It was the difference between a form that says a thing is fine and someone who actually went and looked. Every claim in that report had my name on it, and somebody downstream was going to make a financial decision based on it.

That is the entire reason I am a decent developer. A build that compiles is a form that says the thing is fine. It is not the walk-through. So I verify against what is actually live — I check that the file on the server changed, that the cron ran, that the page renders for someone who is not me. Most of what goes wrong in this work hides in the gap between "it built" and "it shipped."

Selected Worksix of
fifty-plus
Product

RealBurg News

realburgnews.com

A Next.js 14 news aggregator for Fredericksburg. It ingests from multiple sources on a schedule, indexes the full archive for instant client-side search, and runs a civic events calendar wired directly to the city's municipal feed — so the listings stay current without anyone maintaining them.

Findings Runs unattended on cron pipelines. Uptime probe and nightly backups in place; the search index is built at deploy time so the archive stays searchable with no runtime database call.
Next.js 14 · TypeScript · Node.js · MiniSearch · cron pipelines · pm2 · Caddy
Product

Cosmic Studio

cosmicstudio.app

A real-time audio application built on the Web Audio API — amp and pedal modeling, an instrument tuner, and multitrack capture, all running in the browser at latency low enough to actually play through. The same codebase ships as an Electron desktop build.

Findings Real-time DSP in a browser is unforgiving — a dropped buffer is audible. Signal path is tuned for latency, not throughput, and degrades predictably on weaker hardware rather than glitching.
Web Audio API · Next.js · TypeScript · Electron · real-time DSP
Product

XFinale

xfinale.com

An automated broadcast console. Six scheduled jobs sweep 129 channels, feed a twenty-five-table SQLite station database, and compose nightly briefs. A Node service behind Caddy serves it, and the front end degrades to self-contained placeholder content if the API is unreachable — public pages always paint.

Findings Every fetch is wrapped with a fallback, so a backend outage is invisible to a visitor and honest to an operator. API health is probed on a schedule rather than discovered by a person.
Node.js · SQLite · systemd · REST API · cron pipelines · Caddy
Client

It's Not Just a Stick

itsnotjustastick.com

A commissioned storefront and portfolio for a hand-carving artisan. The show schedule renders from a single structured source, so the client updates their craft-fair calendar without touching markup or calling me. Built to load fast and read well on a phone, in a booth, on bad rural signal.

Findings The measure of this one is that the client does not need me to run it. Content edits require no developer, no CMS login, and no monthly platform fee.
Semantic HTML/CSS/JS · JSON-driven rendering · responsive · rsync deploy
Showpiece

The Soul Hunter

thesoulhunter.com

An interactive 3D piece on Three.js with custom post-processing — real exoplanet catalog data, NASA texture sets, and physics-driven interaction. This is where I push the hardware and find out what the browser will actually give me.

Findings Holds a 60 fps target on a heavy real-time scene through progressive asset loading and deliberate quality fallbacks, rather than assuming everyone arrives on a fast machine.
Three.js · WebGL · GLSL · UnrealBloom post-processing · Web Audio
Spec

Restaurant concept unbuilt spec

A speculative build for a family-run Mexican restaurant in town — menu, story, and location pages designed to carry a small kitchen's personality with nothing to maintain afterward. Made on my own initiative, as a way of showing rather than pitching.

Findings Shown unnamed and unlinked. It is a concept the owners have not adopted, and presenting it as their site — or as a client engagement — would misrepresent both of us.
Semantic HTML/CSS/JS · responsive · image optimization
Capabilities

Frontend

React · Next.js 14 · TypeScript · JavaScript · Tailwind CSS · Three.js / WebGL · Web Audio API · responsive and accessible interfaces

Backend & Data

Node.js · Express · Supabase · PostgreSQL · SQLite · REST APIs · edge and serverless functions · authentication · third-party API integration

Infrastructure

Ubuntu server administration · Caddy · nginx · pm2 · systemd · Docker · DNS and TLS · SSH hardening and fail2ban · automated backups · uptime monitoring · git push-to-deploy

Practice

AI-assisted development workflows · performance optimization · technical SEO · client discovery and scoping · end-to-end delivery and ongoing support

Before This

Before software

I built the book of business to roughly twenty-five carriers and agencies, set the pricing, and did every inspection myself. Several hundred of them: interior and exterior condition assessments, plus specialty work — including pre-shipment condition reports on exotic cars, where the whole job is documenting exactly what a vehicle looked like before somebody else moved it.

Closed it in 2024 to build software full time. What carried over was not a technical skill. It was the habit of writing down only what I had actually verified, under a deadline, with my name on it.

Away from a keyboard I am outdoors — hiking, camping, farming — or playing guitar and making music. Two of those found their way onto this page. Cosmic Studio exists because I play, and a carver's storefront made sense to me because I already work with my hands. The projects that go anywhere tend to start with something I cared about first.

Working
Together

Contract

Direct engagements, scoped and priced up front. Discovery through launch, then ongoing support if you want it.

White-label

Build under your agency's name. I stay invisible to your client and hit your dates.

Overflow

Extra hands when your queue is full. Self-directed — you should not have to manage me.

I hold committed delivery dates, and I work whatever schedule the deadline requires — nights and weekends through launches, migrations, and incidents. No project gets handed off part-finished.

I own the whole stack on every engagement, which means there is exactly one person to call when something breaks at eleven at night, and that person already knows how it was built.

Contact