The part other people call overkill.

I'm Drew. I work in IT, I build things that did not strictly need building, and I have an attention span that only has two settings.

The day job taught me the useful half

Most days in IT involve working out why something that worked yesterday does not work today. You learn to be systematic about it — check the boring thing first, change one variable at a time, and never trust a fix you cannot explain.

That turns out to be exactly the skill set for pulling files off a drive that has stopped cooperating, or working out why a photograph scanned badly in 2003 and what can be done about it now. The methodical part transfers completely. The difference is that nobody cries about a printer.

The other half is less professional

I'm neurodivergent. The practical version is that I do not have a volume knob on attention — when something has my interest, it gets all of it, and when it does not, getting started is genuinely hard.

I have spent an entire evening making sure every contact in my phone had the right company logo attached. Nobody asked. It is objectively an absurd use of a Saturday. It also made the phone feel correct in a way I still struggle to justify out loud.

That is the whole business model, honestly. I am not selling a skill nobody else has. I am selling a willingness to go further into something than any sensible person would — at your grandmother's photograph, at a smart home that half works, at a parts list with forty browser tabs behind it.

What that looks like in practice

Latent is the restoration and recovery side. Photographs that faded or tore, tapes nobody owns a player for, files that vanished off a card. It is careful work on things that cannot be replaced, which is the kind of pressure I respond well to.

Consulting is the research instinct pointed at someone else's problem — smart home plans, project parts lists, and the digital tidying nobody has a spare weekend for.

The projects are what happens when none of that is going on. A sim rig that started as a wheel clamped to a desk. A display that shows what is playing, in a housing designed so no screws are visible from the front. Apps built because the existing option was almost right.

How I like to work

I would rather talk you out of spending money than take it for something that will disappoint you. If your photo is too far gone, or the $40 device would genuinely solve your problem, I will say so — partly because it is the right thing and partly because I have to live with having said it.

I answer my own email, usually the same day. There is no team, no ticketing system, and nobody else touching your files. That is a limitation and a feature at the same time, and it is worth knowing which parts of it matter to you.