Welcome to the Cone Crows engineering blog! I'm Trey — the solo dev behind Cone Crows LLC — and this is where I'll be sharing technical insights, project updates, and lessons learned as I build software that connects communities.

Why "Cone Crows"?

The name comes from my car enthusiast background. I'm heavily involved in autocrossing — the motorsport where you race around traffic cones — and autocrossers often call themselves "cone killers" or some variation. A group of crows is called a murder, so it's not a leap from killers to crows. Builds is both an automotive app and a social app, so I wanted something that conveyed community and plurality. The crow theme stuck, and it's since become intentional branding across everything I build.

What I'm Building

Cone Crows has a few projects in various stages:

• Builds — A mobile social platform for car enthusiasts. Think version control for your cars: your profile is your Garage, your cars are Rides, and each Ride tracks its Builds over time. Released in July 2025 and under active development.
• Grimly — A digital grimoire for modern witches, with a very astute crow mascot (also named Grimly). Three planned variants: web, a social mobile edition, and a private Personal Edition. Still in development.
• Harken — A developer-focused platform for collecting in-app user feedback. I built this because commercial feedback tools were way too expensive for the small user base my apps had, and I didn't need the extra baggage of community voting features. Soft launched and already integrated into Builds.
• Something new is brewing — An AI-powered thinking partner that takes a fresh approach to chatbots. More on this one soon.

What to Expect

This blog will cover a range of topics across these projects:

• Technical deep dives into architecture decisions and tradeoffs
• Solo dev lessons — what works, what doesn't, and what I'd do differently
• Project updates and new feature announcements
• Open source contributions and community involvement

The Tech Stack

I've settled into a core stack that I reach for across projects, though each one has its own history:

const coneCrows = {
  mobile: ["React Native", "TypeScript", "Expo"],
  web: ["Next.js", "TypeScript", "React"],
  backend: ["Node.js", "Fastify", "REST"],
  data: ["Supabase (Postgres, Auth, Storage)"],
  deployment: ["Vercel", "fly.io"],
};

Builds is the exception on the API layer — it uses GraphQL via Apollo, and migrating to REST isn't worth the cost at this point. Every new project uses REST. That's a story worth its own blog post.

Why Blog?

Building in public keeps me accountable and helps give back to the developer community. I've learned a lot from other engineers sharing their experiences, and I want to do the same. As a solo dev juggling multiple products, there's no shortage of things to write about — from choosing between GraphQL and REST, to building a feedback SDK, to figuring out how to actually ship as a one-person team.

Whether you're a car enthusiast curious about how Builds works under the hood, a developer interested in the technical decisions behind these projects, or just someone who enjoys reading about the solo dev journey — I hope you'll find something useful here.

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Thanks for reading, and welcome aboard!