A one-person software studio

Reported at breakfast.
Live by lunch.

Shortbird builds and maintains software with turnaround measured in hours, not sprints. Senior craftsmanship, an AI‑accelerated pipeline, and every change fully reviewed and tested before it reaches production.

Start a project How it works
One ticket, one morning how a request moves, hour by hour
  1. 9:14 am

    Reported

    “Checkout is failing on saved cards.” Ticket opened, client notified.

  2. 9:31 am

    Agent drafting

    An AI agent writes the patch in minutes, on a branch, with tests.

  3. 10:05 am

    Human review

    I review the agent’s work and test it against the real product.

  4. 10:40 am

    Staging approved

    Client clicks through the fix on a staging link and signs off.

  5. 11:02 am

    Live in production

    1h 48m from report to deploy.

0yrs building production software
0% of agent work reviewed & tested by me
1 person to talk to. Ever.

Process

Three steps. No tickets lost,
no sprints to wait for.

01

Send it

Bug, tweak, or brand-new feature — send it in anytime. It becomes a tracked request the moment it arrives, and you can watch its status the whole way.

02

Built with AI leverage, reviewed by me

Speed from the machines, judgment and accountability from a senior engineer.

03

You approve, it ships

You get a staging link (usually within hours). Nothing touches production without your go-ahead. Say the word and it’s live.

What I build

Selected work

Small studio. Real products.

Optio

An education platform where students build self-validated diplomas through quests — evidence portfolios, XP, an AI tutor. Designed, built, and run end-to-end.

iOS · Android · Web · optioeducation.com

Dub

Tournament bracket picks with friends — fill out a bracket, earn points on every correct call, climb the leaderboard.

Web app · getdub.com

Sites & internal tools

A portfolio of production websites and web apps under active management — plus the school automations that saved staff dozens of hours every week.

Web · Automation · Retainers

Who’s behind Shortbird

Ten years shipping software.
A teacher’s gift for explaining it.

Shortbird is Dr. Tanner Bowman — an engineer who designs, builds, and runs production software end to end: web apps, mobile apps on both stores, and the internal tools that quietly keep organizations moving.

Before Shortbird, he spent a decade teaching computer science while engineering his school’s automations — tools that saved staff dozens of hours every week. The teaching habit stuck: plain-English explanations, fast answers, no jargon.

Kind words

“We’ve worked with dozens of programmers over the years. Even with AI tools, other devs would quote us 2–3 weeks for small changes. We hired Shortbird and get rapid iteration — sometimes multiple changes per day! One dev shop quoted us an 18‑month timeline for what we wanted, and it happened in 4 months with Shortbird.”
Owners · Dub
“Tanner has been – and continues to be! – truly amazing to work with in creating and developing my online sheet music store. He has taken every idea I had and not only implemented it far faster than I could describe it, but expanded on it and made it better than I ever imagined! If I ever had a complaint, he always responded with “Great feedback!” Always friendly, positive, efficient – exceeding my expectations on every count!”
David Chamberlin · Chamberlin Music Enterprises
“Platform was SO easy and organized! The process was actually so nice! Very organized and easy to use.”
Optio user
“Using the app was so easy and very nice.”
Optio user

Have something that needs
to exist by Friday?

Tell me what you’re building — or what’s broken. You’ll hear back within minutes.

hello@shortbird.dev