Hello — what BFD Mapping actually does
I'm Mark. I spent twenty years building software products, the last five of which have been mostly about getting AI to do useful things in real businesses, not in demos.
BFD Mapping is the studio I run around that work. The pitch is short: I ship AI integrations and workflow automation for operators who already know what they want fixed, and don't have the patience for another six-month consulting engagement to find out.
The kind of work I take
Three flavors, give or take:
- "We have data flowing through six systems and none of them talk to each other." Pipelines, webhooks, API glue, OCR, classification. The unglamorous middle layer that quietly turns a chaotic operation into one you can report on.
- "We've been told AI will solve this. Will it?" Honest assessment, prototype in a week or two, production version a few weeks after that. Or a recommendation to not do it — that's also a legitimate deliverable.
- "Our internal automation is held together with cron jobs and prayer." Replacing brittle scripts with workflows that are observable, restartable, and that won't break when the one person who understood them goes on vacation.
How I work
One person — me — on every engagement. I write the code, design the architecture, run the deploys, and answer the email. There is no junior team that quietly does the actual work. The upside: you get a senior operator's full attention. The downside: I can only take a handful of projects at a time.
Most engagements start with a 30-minute Zoom. No deck. Bring an actual problem; we'll talk through whether I'm the right person to solve it. If I'm not, I usually know who is.
Why "BFD Mapping"?
Original sense: literal mapping work — drone-derived spatial analytics for drainage and water-management projects, which is still part of what I do. The name stuck as the studio grew into broader integration work, because most of what I build is, fundamentally, mapping: from one schema to another, from messy input to structured output, from a vague business question to a concrete pipeline that answers it.
Also: BFD. Use your imagination.
What's next
This blog will be short field notes — what I'm building, what's working in production, what I'd build differently. New posts cross-post to LinkedIn and Substack when each is ready. If you want them in your inbox, the Substack subscribe link is in the footer.
If something here resonates and you want to talk, grab 30 minutes.