Friday evening. Most people are putting their feet up, and I'm about to spend the next four hours hoovering offices.
People sometimes look surprised when they find out the founder of a software consultancy also pushes a vacuum round commercial offices on a Friday night, but I've never seen the contradiction. Cleaning is part of the family trade — we've run the cleaning business since 2011, and the website I built for it back then is still going strong today. The engineering and the graft have always run side by side.
Four hours of hoovering is honest, physical work, and it clears the head like nothing else. There is a certain meditation in an empty office at night: just the machine, the carpet, and time to think. Half the product ideas I've had started in a room somebody else had gone home from.
It also keeps the software honest. The offices I clean belong to small businesses — the exact people PMD Services builds apps for. You learn more about how work actually gets done by being the person who does it than by reading any spreadsheet. When BuildMe says "built by a builder, for builders," I mean it literally: I know what it is to finish a shift, deal with the paperwork at night, and want the boring part to take seconds instead of hours. That is the gap every product on the pipeline is aimed at.
So that's tonight: four hours, a vacuum, and a to-do list in my head. If I can't fix it, I'll make a new one — and if the offices need hoovering, I'll do that too. Have a good weekend, and I'll see you on the other side of the mop.