SOFTWARE ENGINEER · INDEPENDENT · IOWA
Donnie Harding
An independent studio shipping Manifest V3 Chrome extensions and browser idle games — and, on the other side of the desk, the production automation and AI tooling that runs a legal-process-serving firm.
About
DHSeaDev is the independent studio behind a run of Manifest V3 Chrome extensions and idle games — but the games are only half the story. The same person shipping browser toys under the #DHSeaDev tag builds production automation and AI tooling for the legal-process-serving industry.
The throughline is encoding institutional knowledge into software: taking the schemas, workflows, and compliance rules that normally live in someone’s head and turning them into tools that stay correct on the first pass — whether that’s an idle RPG’s offline-accrual math or a court e-filing robot’s document-ordering logic.
Professional Work
As a Data Entry Operator at HSPS Legal Process Serving (serving Iowa, Wisconsin, and Missouri), the developer independently designed and shipped the firm’s internal automation and AI portfolio on top of ServeManager — the process-serving industry’s job-management platform.
HSPS Marshall
A sidebar extension the dispatch team works in daily inside ServeManager: AI job analysis with evidence-confidence ratings, a chat grounded only in the open job’s real data, voice-memo transcription, a severity-ranked team watchlist, and Quick/Batch Notes that write back to ServeManager behind exact-match resolution and a human confirm-gate. Multi-provider LLM fallback with prompt-injection defenses on untrusted job data.
ServeBoard
A desktop analytics and coaching platform normalizing 66-column ServeManager exports into a canonical field model — server scorecards, drill-down reports, ratio-eligibility and controllability logic encoded directly in code, every release verified by a headless test suite.
EDMS Auto-Filer
A single-file RPA pipeline that drafts small-claims and civil filings against Iowa’s eFlex court e-filing system (EDMS), with filing type and document set derived from suit amount. Drafts-only by architecture — a human confirm-gate means attorneys finalize and pay; the robot never submits an irreversible court action on its own.
What Sets the Work Apart
- Domain encoding — ServeManager and ServeHawk quirks, ratio math, and filing workflows translated into software constraints, documented once and reused, surviving staff turnover.
- Verification-gated shipping — no fix without root-cause investigation, no “done” without runtime evidence, re-entrancy guards on every async write, a pre-ship check gate before every bundle.
- Self-directed — every project initiated, scoped, built, and shipped solo, without a dev team.
How the Work Gets Built
Most of what I ship is built alongside Claude, and I think that is worth being direct about rather than quiet about. It has changed what a single developer can credibly take on — not because the writing goes faster, but because the expensive part of solo work was never the typing. It was holding an entire system in your head while you change one corner of it.
What makes it work is that I treat the model as a fast collaborator with no memory of consequences, and I build the guardrails around that. Every edit asserts its target is unique before it writes. Every write asserts the saved bytes match what was sent. Nothing is called finished without runtime evidence — code executed, output observed, the actual page loaded and measured. When an assertion fails, the write is refused rather than attempted, and that has caught real defects that would otherwise have shipped.
The discipline compounds. When a failure shows up twice it stops being something I remember and becomes a written rule. A renderer that quietly escapes one character sequence inside a script, breaking it at parse with nothing in the console. A component registered a fraction of a second too late, so it renders correctly and silently never syncs. Those cost hours once. They cost nothing now.
The result is that I attempt things a solo developer would usually decline: a fourteen-project portfolio, production automation running against systems that were never designed to be automated, and a website where the shared multiplayer layer, the arcade game and the structured data were all built and verified in the open. I make the decisions and I own what ships. The tooling is what lets one person hold that much surface area without dropping it.
Publication
The Gilded Keeper: A Self-Portrait — self-published via Kindle Direct Publishing, November 2025. Authored, designed, and shipped end-to-end.
Get In Touch
Open for work
Browser tools, automation, internal tooling, and the awkward jobs nobody budgeted for. If you have something you want built, I would like to hear about it.