Fifty-one, laid off, and looking at the driver app.

At 51, I added rideshare driver to the résumé. Corporate layoffs had opened a hole in the income, and the bills had no interest in waiting for the next chapter. I had a car, a town I knew, and some hours between family commitments. Driving was a practical answer.

I grew up in Wilmington. That helps with the roads. It does less for the question I kept coming back to after going online: am I making good use of the time I actually have? There’s the ride, the trip to the pickup, the gap before the next one, and the place I end up when I need to stop.

My business background made me impatient for a clear report. I wanted total working hours beside ride hours. Tips on their own line. Bonuses on another. I wanted to compare parts of the day without giving a lucky tip credit for an entire business strategy. That did not seem like an unreasonable amount to ask of a technology company.

I even formed an LLC for the driving. It made the mismatch more noticeable to me: I was setting up a small business, but most of its controls lived in somebody else’s app. Uber and Lyft have their own priorities. I have a family pickup to make and a limited number of hours to earn. Sometimes those priorities line up. I want to understand when they don’t.

So I did what I tend to do when a tool frustrates me: I started making another one. The reporting project uses a prompt and method in Claude to assemble driver records into a view I can check. It needs good inputs and a shift log. AI cannot recover working hours that nobody recorded, however convincing the finished report looks.

The family had already given me a scheduling problem worth building an app for. Music gave me a more enjoyable project: a radio app built around artists coming to Wilmington. I seem to have turned a way to earn some extra cash into a small collection of software projects.

That is why this page exists. I’m driving, doing the arithmetic, and writing down what I find. Some posts will be about the marketplace. Some will be about getting everyone to practice. And some will be about a song, because I still want to enjoy the time I spend in the car.