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.
We work across the whole system and the whole lifecycle. Building products with full-stack development. Making them fast, findable, and accessible. Keeping them reliable, secure, and affordable to run. And leading the teams behind them. When the work is the media itself, like video, live streaming, photography, and design, we do that too.
It isn’t always the flashy work. It’s the work your users feel every single day.
Hitchpost is built on production experience from teams at Runwise, 37signals, Realtor.com, and Cox Media Group. Sweating Core Web Vitals. Running incidents. Building infrastructure that holds up under real traffic.
You might start with a packaged audit, a full-stack build, a cloud migration, a workshop, or a steady senior hand while you grow. The goal stays the same either way. We leave your systems faster, sturdier, and easier to run than we found them.
If what you need is simpler than all that, a website has its own page and its own prices. Nonprofits have one too, because grant funding changes what’s possible and almost nobody explains how.
Who you're working with
Jesse Heady
Founder & principal engineer
I’ve spent my career on the parts of software people actually feel. How fast a page loads. Whether it stays up under pressure. What it costs to run, and how it got built in the first place.
That work took me through engineering and leadership roles at Runwise, 37signals, Realtor.com, and Cox Media Group. I’ve owned production systems and perfected Core Web Vitals, a full year before Google made them a ranking factor. I’ve run incidents at 3 a.m., then built the response process so the next one went better. I helped a cloud migration that saved seven figures a year.
I started Hitchpost to bring that experience to teams directly, without the overhead of a big agency. 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 you’ll usually find me cycling, streaming, or somewhere outside looking up at the stars. I studied computer science at West Virginia University, and I’ve spent years involved in public art and local tech community work in Morgantown, WV. A good deal of that creative work, video, live streaming, photography, and design, I now bring to client projects too.
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 load times and reliability means 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
Hitchpost is a small, senior practice, so we’re honest about scope. If your project needs something outside our wheelhouse, or more hands than one principal can give, we’ll say so, then bring in trusted engineers and leaders we’ve worked with and vouch for, or point you to the right specialist. You get a straight answer and a good outcome, not a hard sell.
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.