About
What we're about
Hitchpost is a small, senior practice for the lifecycle of a web product: building it, making it fast and reliable, running it, leading the team behind it, and producing the media around it.
It isn’t always the flashy work, but it’s the work your users feel every day. An engagement with us might start with a packaged audit, a full-stack build, a cloud migration, or support from a steady senior hand while you grow. Either way, our goal is to leave your systems faster, sturdier, and easier to run than we found them. Need something simpler? Websites have their own page and prices. Nonprofits do too, because grant funding changes what’s possible.
Who you're working with
Jesse Heady
Founder & principal engineer
I’ve spent my career on the parts of software people feel: how fast a page loads, whether it stays up under pressure, and what it costs to run.
At Cox Media Group and Realtor.com that meant performance engineering and Core Web Vitals. At 37signals and Runwise it meant reliability: running incidents, then building the response process so the next one went better. I helped with a cloud migration that cut $1.9M in cloud spend.
I started Hitchpost to bring that experience to teams directly. The person who scopes your work is the person who does it, and the person you talk to afterward.
When I’m not in a terminal, I’m usually cycling, streaming, or outside looking at the stars. I studied computer science at West Virginia University and have spent years in public art and local tech community work in Morgantown, WV.
Jesse’s experience
- Runwise: Engineering Manager, Site Reliability (2025–2026)
- 37signals: Senior Site Reliability Engineer (2022–2024)
- Realtor.com: Senior Manager and Staff Performance Engineer, SRE (2020–2022)
- Cox Media Group: Lead Performance Engineer, Solutions Architect, Dev Manager (2009–2019)
How we work
- Measure first. We don’t guess. Real numbers, from the lab and the field, drive the work.
- Process over apps. Good outcomes come from clear process, not the newest tool.
- Small improvements compound. Faster, more reliable sites mean better engagement and higher conversion.
- Leave it maintainable. We document and hand off, so your team owns the work after we’re gone.
Trusted partners
If your project needs something outside our wheelhouse, or more hands than one person can give, we’ll say so. Then we bring in engineers and leaders we’ve worked with and vouch for, or point you to the right specialist.
Why Hitchpost?
The web moves like a frontier town: fast, loud, and half-built.
A hitching post is the one fixed, dependable thing on the street, solid and exactly where you left it. That’s what we want to be for you, your team, and your systems.