Why Clean. Why Now.

There’s a story about someone getting lost in the snow in Alaska and as they are getting ready to give up hope an Eskimo comes along and guides them to safety.

In the rooms of recovery this is the first person who ever guided you to a meeting. For me that person was Evan, although by the time I needed him I already knew him for years. I knew whom to call.

I guess it was some time in ’96 or ’97 when I walked into my first NA meeting. I was high. I had arranged to meet Evan by the dorms at Pace University’s Briarcliffe campus so I could get there early and score before we headed to the meeting.

Addicts are funny this way. Sure I’ll go to my first meeting but there’s no way I’m doing it straight!

That day was the pivot that began what so far has been a 27 year journey. If anyone had told me back then what I would accomplish by now I would have thought they were crazy. I might have said it sounds nice but me? No way.

It was a long struggle before I could say honestly that I was clean.

I remember going to this one meeting and getting a 30 chip (not my first). I was genuinely doing much better. Even a coworker remarked that our boss had told her that I seemed to be doing much better. I was showing up on time, and my focus was there. That’s all I needed to be able to do any job really well.

As I was leaving the meeting with my 30 day chip I was contemplating going to score. Crazy right? This is what we do. We convince ourselves that now that we’re clean for a minute we can control it. It’s an illusion, it’s a confusion, and every real addict falls prey to it.

There went my 30 days again and all of the goodwill that I had created with it.

On April 5, 1999 I finally got clean for the last time so far. I didn’t know it was for good yet and it would be at least a year before I realized what the difference was. You see all the times before that I tried to get clean, I “hoped” I could. This last time I was certain I couldn’t. I gave up hope. I no longer saw myself having any options. Ironically maybe that was the place I needed to be in order to be willing to do what it takes to get and stay clean.

Hopeless.

Another thing I remember from early on then is something I read (I don’t remember where and I can’t find a reference to who wrote this):

Nothing is the place of infinite possibility.

Just before I headed to California to go into the Chabad Residential Treatment Center here in Los Angeles my father took me to Shabbat dinner with a Rabbi whom he had confided in and consulted a lot about how to handle me. This was where I heard the other thing I’ve remembered for the next 27 years so far.

The Rabbi’s wife explained to me that I had a raging bull inside of me and that I was about to embark on a journey that would show me how to tame that bull. She went on to explain that if I was successful there would be nothing that could stop me from achieving anything I set my mind to.

And that brings me to April 5, 2026.

Clean is what I am. Clean is what your books should be. Clean is what your data, your forecasts, and your systems need to be. One word. Everything.

As of the moment I am writing this, April 5 is approaching. By the time you are reading this it will likely be a few months later, but this day, marking 27 years clean feels significant. Heading into this year I had a plan and looking back on almost 27 years of sobriety I can see how taming that raging bull has guided me. From a series of temp jobs that eventually landed me a permanent position and then into a CPA firm where that three years or so of experience convinced me that I was unemployable. Not in the sense that I was not able to keep my jobs. I did, but I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand working for other people and that is in essence why I started Nerd Enterprises as a dba in 2003. I incorporated it in 2007 after I made the mistake of going to work for one of my clients.

They say that insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. Then I learned a much better definition. Insanity is doing something knowing full well what is going to happen and doing it anyway. I finally learned my lesson and incorporating Nerd Enterprises, Inc. was my way of saying I am now 150% committed.

These years of being in recovery have been long, interesting, inspiring, stressful, and hard work. And if I had to sum up what I learned in 27 years in as short a sentence as possible, I would say this.

It amounts to learning to become the best possible version of myself, physically, mentally, and spiritually.

My plan going into this year was based on tripling down on that. Over the recent years I found stoic wisdom to be that next level that I needed to reinforce this path. Then I created what I call my design for living. This is represented now in a database in Notion that lays out exactly what I want to be doing every day hour by hour. You see, if I want to become the best possible version of myself physically, mentally, and spiritually I need routines that are designed to accomplish that.

I filled up my schedule with routines for this exact purpose and in that process I realized I hadn’t left any time for anything “social”. I was ok with that. Stoicism encourages us to learn to be ok being alone. It doesn’t mean we have to, but we can if we want to and especially if it means focus on the main idea which is bettering ourselves on every level.

Then on December 31, 2025 I wrote in my journal that I would just meet people at The Huntington Library when and if the opportunity arose. And here is where it gets interesting. Within two weeks of that I did have someone reach out to me and we arranged to meet there. Then the week leading up to our meeting I got an email about Vibe Coding. By then I had read about this but this convinced me that it was something I needed to learn. Then at my meeting at The Huntington this is exactly what my friend wanted to show me. He was vibe coding an entire platform that he’s building. Before we got into his project he spent an hour or so showing me how it works with Claude Code.

When I got home that night I installed Claude and got to work. I had no idea what I was going to do with it, but something inside me was driving me and I just knew I had to learn this. That was in late January and I am writing this in late March. So let me tell you what that raging bull drove me to accomplish in less than two months.

I decided that I would create an app to simplify the process of collecting W9 info. I didn’t care if it was going to be an app anyone would want to use. I just wanted to learn how to do this. By the time I was done with what I am now calling Clean 1099s I had also figured out what I wanted to do next.

It was big. It was hairy. It was audacious and I was almost certain I wouldn’t be able to do it. I figured I would likely hit a road block somewhere that would confirm there was no way I could do it, but again I knew that if nothing else I would learn a ton and then I would know for sure what I wanted to do next.

Once I realized this was something I wanted to do very badly I went back to that design for living to see what routine I could build around vibe coding. Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2 – 4 pm. That was it. It meant not allowing time for calls with people and likely not enrolling any new members in THA (The Holistic Accountant) for a while and I was ok with that.

While I was working on Clean 1099s I decided to start laying the groundwork for how I might go about designing my own accounting software. I have always looked at products like QuickBooks Online differently than I think most people do. You see an invoice form with a customer drop down. What I see is a drop down with an element of a linked database. In general I have always seen QuickBooks as a series of databases and tables that must be linked together. I learned about linked databases early in my sobriety with Microsoft Access. It’s probably worth mentioning here that before I studied accounting I studied computer science.

I started by listing and then building the data structures I thought I would need in Notion. Notion is great with relational databases so it was kind of perfect here. It turns out that this was a really smart way to build a schema for how this needs to work.

Meanwhile I talked to Claude and asked him if I was crazy. And I kept thinking about what I think Steve Jobs said about how the people who change the world are the ones who are crazy enough to think they could do it. I don’t know about changing the world but I am definitely crazy enough to think I can do things that most people would never even consider.

Claude not only encouraged me, but he explained why I might in fact be uniquely positioned to do it. There are many people who know accounting really well. And there are many people who know how to design software and who understand data structures and architecture. Very few know both, and even fewer know how to explain it well. And the one skill you need to know with Vibe Coding is how to explain things really well. We’re dealing with very detailed architecture. It’s hard enough to build data structures, but to make sure debits and credits balance in the process is another level.

Off I went. The Tuesday Thursday routine turned into what I like to call a healthy obsession. It became all I could think about. And then there was the fast progress. I don’t believe in coincidences and during this same time I was wrapping up reading a book called, The Code of the Extraordinary Mind. The final chapter in this book talks about how when you find your “quest” at any point in your life and then you really believe in and expect it to become reality, that’s when the magic happens. It feels like you’re bending reality, but there is also a very scientific explanation. It’s called the RAS or reticular activating system. In short you can train your brain to filter information with a specific purpose in mind. Then you notice things you might not have otherwise that make it seem like opportunities are just lining up.

This is clearly my current quest.

Clean 1099s is now ready. I’m just waiting for an approval from Google because I’m using their APIs. The app is built on an app script in Google, and html for the front end.

As I approached completion on Clean 1099s I asked Claude if I should do something else small first or if I should go right for the big one. Claude said I already confirmed everything I need to know and that anything else would be a waste of time.

Now I am weeks away from having 🧹Clean Books ready for R1. Not only can I not believe I was able to do this, but I thought it would take a year, not a month! By the time you read this it means I’ve launched. This is where that “bending reality” part seems to come into play.

Everybody wants clean books. In the accounting field we talk about clean-up jobs and keeping the books clean. So on a number of levels this name seemed perfect and as I plan to roll out a family of products, I am putting them all under the heading of Clean by Nerd Enterprises, Inc.

I paid an insane level of attention to detail in designing 🧹Clean Books. Make no mistake. Even though I didn’t write any of my own code — I did go in and edit code at times because that was easier than having Claude write it. I did this with Claude’s direct supervision. There is a different set of skills here. I already mentioned the skill of being able to articulate what you need and want really well. Bigger picture: I am the architect with the blueprint. Claude and then Lexi (what we named Lovable) are the engineers. It truly felt like I had a team of developers working with me to bring my vision to life. I think at least 50% of it was me asking if something was possible or easy and expecting the answer to be that it’s too complex to do only to be pleasantly surprised. Heck we even have a hyperspace button. NO other accounting software can claim that and you’re going to have to try it and then find it to experience it!

In fact I was surprised how easy it was to build features that I assumed would be hard because no one else had done it. Now I have a different point of view. When you have software developers who don’t really know the pain of being in the trenches doing the accounting work they just don’t understand the importance of certain features. For my entire career the accounting community has been giving feedback to accounting software companies and it often feels like very little of it has been followed. Especially after what I just experienced, I don’t understand why some very simple things aren’t available as features that I built into 🧹Clean Books for R1.

This is where my raging bull has brought me after 27 years. As we were developing this I did everything I could to break it so that you won’t. And I wanted to make sure that if you choose to use it, you have a place to go to learn and share feedback.