About

I'm Wally Mayfield. I write software for a living and, when the day is going well, for fun. The thing I keep coming back to, in work and in writing, is that a job is supposed to be part of a life — not the other way around. A lot of how we work, and a lot of the tools we've built to do it, quietly assume otherwise. I'm interested in what it looks like when they don't.

Right now I'm building a tool for teams that handles what most companies split between a chat app and a project management tool. It's not announced, and it doesn't have a name I'm willing to say out loud yet. The premise is that most of these tools are designed around the assumption that everyone is online at the same time and happy to be interrupted, and that the conversation is more important than the record it leaves behind. Both are bad defaults. I'm building for the opposite ones.

The writing here keeps coming back to the same territory from different angles: how work has expanded into places it doesn't belong, and what it would look like if it didn't. Sometimes that's about boundaries — the personal phone, the after-hours ping, the apps your job quietly installed in your life. Sometimes it's about how work itself could be different — async by default, documented by design, less performative and more honest. Most of what's wrong is structural, which means it's fixable, but not by trying harder. I'd rather post one thing I mean than ten I don't.

Best way to reach me is email: hello@wallymayfield.com. I read everything; I'm slow to reply. I'm also on Bluesky and GitHub.