I’m Justin, and Quickhatch is my software studio. Here’s where the name comes from.
The model is simple: I build software that solves real, annoying problems, and I sell it straight to the people and businesses who use it at a clear price.
So why “Quickhatch”?
The Toledo War
In 1835, Michigan and Ohio nearly came to blows over a thin strip of land near present-day Toledo. Both claimed it. Both sent militia. History remembers it as the Toledo War, though hardly a shot was fired and the only bloodshed was a single non-fatal stabbing.
During the standoff, Ohioans took to calling their northern neighbors “wolverines”: greedy, scrappy, stubborn, unwilling to back down from a fight they were probably going to lose. It was meant as an insult.
Michigan lost the strip. As a consolation prize, they acquired statehood and the Upper Peninsula, which turned out to be the far better end of the deal: the UP held some of the richest copper and iron ore in the country, plus timber to match, and it repaid the lost strip many times over. The wolverine name stuck. By the time Michigan became a state in 1837, it was the state’s animal.
The wolverine
The wolverine has collected a lot of names over the years: skunk bear, glutton, carcajou, and, my favorite, quickhatch, from the East Cree word kwiihkwahaacheew.
A wolverine is small. It looks like a bear, yet rarely tops forty pounds. It lives alone in some of the harshest country on the continent, ranging across territories that stretch for hundreds of square miles, covering thirty or forty miles in a day on wide, snowshoe-like paws. It isn’t fast, and it doesn’t hunt in packs. What it has is endurance and nerve.
It eats what the land offers: hunting what it can, scavenging the rest, cracking frozen bone with a jaw built for the job, caching food away for leaner days. And for its size, it is bold. A wolverine will walk up on a carcass that a wolf pack or a bear is already working and try to drive them off it without flinching.
Small, self-sufficient, and stubborn about hard problems. That seemed like a good name for a one-person software studio.
What’s next
This is the first post. I’ve got software to build and a long way to go. If you want to follow along, Quickhatch is on LinkedIn.