I Spent 20+ Years in Industrial Maintenance. Now I’m Learning to Build Software.

I spent over 20 years working in industrial maintenance as a boilermaker. Most of that time was in refinery shutdowns and turnarounds—high-pressure environments where systems either hold or fail. There is no “mostly working” in that world. That experience has shaped how I approach software development. ⸻ I’m not just “learning to code.” I’m building systems. I’m currently working on transitioning into web development, but I’m not approaching it as a tutorial exercise I’m building real projects from day one—and documenting the process as I go. Not theory. Not exercises. Actual systems that are meant to run. ⸻ What I’m building right now A portfolio site that behaves like a system (kmwebdev.me) This isn’t a “personal website” in the usual sense. It’s a live system under controlled change. I treat it like industrial maintenance work: versioned updates instead of redesigns small, controlled changes only tracking what changed and why stability over aesthetics Nothing gets changed without intent. ⸻ A production-focused email framework (Skeleton Framework) Alongside the portfolio work, I’m building a separate system for HTML email development. Email is one of the most constrained environments in web development. Rendering is inconsistent, standards are partial, and modern CSS support is unreliable across many clients. So instead of fighting those constraints, I’m building a framework specifically designed around them. The focus is simple: predictable rendering in real-world email clients It’s still early, but it’s being developed with production use in mind—not experimentation. ⸻ The way I work hasn’t changed—only the tools have In industrial maintenance, you learn a few hard rules: don’t assume—verify don’t scale chaos don’t change more than you can test document everything that matters So I carry that directly into development: versioned releases (v1.0, v1.3.6, etc.) controlled incremental changes explicit documentation of limitations real-world testing across environmen