The deploy script runs. Fourteen files hashed, fourteen files uploaded, deploy manifest posted, site live. The terminal spits out a URL. I click it. The page loads. It works. Something that did not exist two and a half hours ago now has an address on the internet. It is 11:47pm. The house is completely silent. My wife is asleep upstairs. The kid has been asleep since half seven. The only sounds are the fridge and the last train rattling past somewhere in the distance. I am sitting at the kitchen table in North London, lit by the screen, and I have just made something.
Nobody knows yet. This is the part I want to talk about. Not the building - I've written about the building. Not the tools or the process or the stack. The moment. The thirty seconds between "it's live" and "should I tell anyone." That window, that half-minute of private knowledge, is the purest feeling in this entire endeavour. The thing exists and only I have seen it. It is mine in a way that it will never be mine again, because the second I share the link, it becomes something else. It becomes other people's opinions. It becomes feedback. It becomes better or worse than expected. But right now, at 11:47pm, it is just a thing I made, and it works, and the feeling is as close to magic as I've found at a kitchen table.
The phone check
I open the URL on my phone. This is the ritual. It doesn't count until you've seen it on a phone. The laptop lies - or at least it flatters. Everything looks reasonable on a thirteen-inch screen in a dark kitchen. The phone tells the truth. The phone is where real people will see it, on a bus, in a queue, in the thirty seconds between one thing and the next. If it works on the phone, it's real.
I'm lying in bed now, phone held above my face like every other person in every other bed in London, except I'm not scrolling. I'm testing. I'm tapping through the pages. I'm checking whether the font size is right, whether the images load, whether the thing I built at the kitchen table survives the transition to the device that actually matters. It does. It usually does, because I've done this enough times now that I build for the phone first and the laptop second. But the check still matters. The check is the difference between a project and a product. A project lives on your laptop. A product lives on someone's phone.
My wife stirs. I angle the phone down, reducing the light. The screen brightness is already at its lowest. I know the exact sequence: power button, place face-down on the bedside table, close eyes, pretend I've been asleep for an hour. She settles. I wait thirty seconds, then pick the phone up again. One more look. Just to make sure it's still there.
Why it's always late
People ask me why I build at night. The practical answer is that I have a young kid and the night is the only uninterrupted time. This is true. But it's not the whole truth. The whole truth is that I've always been a night person, even before the kid, even before the wife, even before London. In Nottingham, as a teenager, the best hours were the late ones. The world narrows. The options reduce. You can't run errands at 11pm. You can't take meetings. You can't be interrupted by the doorbell or the school WhatsApp group or the neighbour who wants to talk about the bins. The night strips away everything except you and the work, and it turns out that's all you need.
There's also something about the tiredness that helps. I know this sounds wrong. Every productivity article ever written says you should do creative work when you're fresh. But a certain kind of tiredness - not exhausted, not delirious, just slightly softened around the edges - removes the part of your brain that second-guesses everything. The part that says "should you really use that colour" or "what will people think of this" or "is this idea good enough." That part goes to bed around 10:30pm, and what's left is the part that just builds. No committee. No internal review process. Just instinct and execution, working together in a quiet kitchen.
The things I build at night are bolder than the things I would build during the day. I'm more willing to try something odd. More willing to commit to an aesthetic that might not work. More willing to ship something that is eighty percent finished because the twenty percent that's missing isn't the twenty percent that matters. The night strips away perfectionism the same way it strips away distraction. What's left is the essence.
The morning after
6:17am. A small face appears at the side of the bed. "Daddy, is it morning?" It is. It is always morning eventually. I negotiate five more minutes, which buys me approximately ninety seconds, and I reach for the phone. Not to check the news. Not to scroll. To check the URL. The product. The thing from last night. Is it still there? Did it work? Was the 11:47pm version as good as I thought, or was that the tiredness talking?
It's there. It works. It looks good - not perfect, there are things I'll fix tonight, but good. The bones are right. The feel is correct. I built this. Between bedtime stories and breakfast, in the hours that nobody sees, I made a thing that works. And now it's morning and there are Weetabix to prepare and school bags to pack and a commute to pretend I'm going to be productive during, and the product I shipped at 11:47pm has to share my brain with all of that. But it doesn't mind. It sits there on its URL, patient, waiting for the evening when I'll come back to it with fresh eyes and a hot chocolate and the quiet house and the whole thing starts again.
The 11:47pm ship. It isn't romantic. It isn't a hustle. It isn't the kind of thing that looks good in a LinkedIn post about morning routines and disciplined schedules. It is a man at a kitchen table, slightly too tired, building something because the alternative is lying in bed thinking about building something. It is the best time I know. It is mine.
