The Dev Playbook

I spent years at studios like EA, Blizzard, and LEGO watching how the best teams ship products. The pattern was always the same: repeatable process, structured phases, clear deliverables at every step. Not because the teams lacked creativity, but because structure let them focus on the creative work instead of reinventing project management every sprint.

The problem is those processes assume teams of 50+. Dedicated PMs, designers, QA leads, DevOps engineers. When you're building solo, you don't have that. You have a laptop, some Diet Mountain Dew, and the determination to ship something that doesn't embarrass you.

The Playbook

The Dev Playbook adapts studio methodology for indie scale. Six phases (Concept, Pre-Production, Production, Testing, Launch, Post-Launch), each with clear steps and concrete deliverables. It works for any app, any platform, any team size (including a team of one).

It's not a framework you install or a tool you subscribe to. It's a process you follow. Each phase answers a specific question before you move on. The discipline comes from doing the work upfront so production is execution, not guesswork.

The entire Playbook is open source on GitHub: 39 step guides, 22 templates, transition checklists for every phase. Free to use, MIT licensed. See how to get started.

Building in Public

Every project I build with the Playbook gets documented in the journal: real decisions, real pivots, real mistakes. Not polished retrospectives written after the fact. If I screw something up, it's in writing. That's the deal.

The goal isn't to look smart. It's to show what actually works when you apply structured process to solo development. Steal whatever's useful.

This Site

This site is itself built with the Playbook. React 19, React Router v7, Tailwind CSS v4, MDX for content, hosted on Cloudflare Pages. It went through the same 6-phase process as every other project in the portfolio. You can read the whole journey in the journal.