Mason James · Remote, U.S.

I build apps and websites for small businesses and nonprofits.

You know your work. I can help with the technology behind it. I’ll take the time to understand what your team needs, explain the options in plain language, and build something you feel comfortable using. Then I can help you look after it.

Book a 20-min call See services and pricing

Notes from my work

October 9, 2026
One post, two ways in
A working example of paid access for people and AI agents. Members can sign in with an existing Content & Chatbot Access or All Access Pass subscription. Agents can purchase this article at /agents/posts/paid-access-demo.md using Base Sepolia test USDC ($0.001 per read).
September 24, 2026
Agent Sessions: one place for every coding-agent conversation
A local-first Mac app that gathers Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Hermes, and other coding-agent histories in one searchable place—without shipping transcripts to the cloud.
September 23, 2026
How to pick an AI coding harness (and when a local chat stack is enough)
Choose an AI coding harness, local chat stack, and team workflow based on the work you do—not a generic best-tool ranking.
July 12, 2026
The Harness Matters: Codex, Claude Code, Pi, Amp, and Hermes Compared
A practical, evidence-weighted comparison of Codex, Claude Code, Pi, Amp, and Hermes using Lilian Weng’s harness-engineering framework.

All writing

A few things I’ve built

featured
Centerpiece by The Chefette SRQ
I built Centerpiece to bring weekly menus, cook visits, receipts, and client communication into one place for The Chefette SRQ.
featured
Avenue941 Attendance App
I built an app that brings attendance, volunteer clearances, enrollment, and reporting together for Avenue941’s after-school teams.
featured
ProposalMint
I’m building ProposalMint to help nonprofits find suitable grants, understand what they need to prepare, and draft proposals grounded in their own work.

All projects

Open-source EmDash plugin Beta

Paid Access

Charge people, AI agents, or both for the same post.

People and AI agentsCharge either audience, or both, for the same post.
Stripe membershipsPlans, Checkout and the customer portal, with email-link sign-in.
x402 pay per readAgents pay in USDC on Base and get the full post as Markdown.

See how it works All EmDash plugins

Colophon

This site runs on a forked emdash stack — including the drag-and-drop media uploads I contributed upstream in PR #1366.

Publishing

A forked emdash install, packaged for this site and rendered by Astro on a Node standalone server. Content persists in SQLite; media uploads resolve from Cloudflare R2.

Interface

The layout began with the Echo template from shadcnblocks; Resources also borrows from the block library. Tailwind CSS drives the palette picker, theme presets, and day/night modes.

Hosting

Served from self-managed Hetzner servers through Docker Swarm and a Caddy-first Dokploy fork. The upstream Caddy provider PR grew out of a long-running Dokploy feature request.

Operations

Public traffic flows through Cloudflare and Caddy; the admin plane stays private on Tailscale. platform-infra keeps Dokploy manifests, Prometheus/Grafana/Loki monitoring, and Restic-to-R2 backups close to the code.

Custom EmDash plugins

The migration runs on a small plugin bench for member access, email, editorial metadata, forms, and post presentation. All plugins →

GitHub Activity

Live work from @masonjames

A rolling contribution map from GitHub, tuned to the same color tokens as the rest of the site.

277active days
31day current streak
31day longest streak
Oct 2, 2026203 contributions