I fill dance floors. I build websites that fill calendars.

I'm Jake Hersky — most people know me as DJ Hersky. It started in the back seat of my dad's car. He had just gotten back into vinyl the way he loved it as a kid, and on every Toronto-to-Ottawa drive, his mixes were the soundtrack. I'd stare out the window and learn what a good transition felt like years before I touched a deck. That's where the ear came from — the highway, not a basement.

For my 13th birthday I asked for a DJ deck. I'd saved up, and my dad took me to the store so we could pick it out together — an SB2. He coached me on branding, on gear, on how to talk to a client before I had one. He got sick in 2013, and by the time I was 16 it had turned terminal, but the way he talked about the work never changed: build something you'd be proud to put your name on. The deck was mine. The standard was his, and I still run on it.

Before the booth there was a lawnmower. I cut my neighbours' grass, then took a job at Tim Hortons and spent a year and nine months as a baker on overnight shifts. Then Calypso Water Park hired me as a seasonal DJ, and Kids Kingdom had me running birthday parties in a children's playground. Different rooms, same lesson: show up early, read the crowd, keep the energy where it needs to be. At 14 I started with Dynamix Entertainment, then Extreme Entertainment — real companies, real weddings, real stakes. At 16 I passed a formal DJ school, which put technique under instinct.

By 20 I was working every event type you can name: weddings, clubs, lounges, water parks, festivals, brand activations, charity galas. I played a lot of clubs over those years and even got flown out for gigs — rooms I'd never seen before, crowds I had to win over fast. Every one taught me the next gig depended on. I learned to read a room in 60 seconds. The most important skill isn't mixing — it's communication, contracts, and showing up early.

My dad didn't just buy me a deck. He got back into vinyl first, played the music I studied from the passenger seat, and sat with me through every question about branding, gigs, and gear. He got sick in 2013 and it became terminal when I was 16 — which mostly meant we stopped wasting time. Every store run and every long drive turned into a working session. Most of what I've built since carries something of his taste in it: do it properly, do it now, put your name on it.

In between the gigs I went to college for electrical and worked the trade for four years, through 2022. Conduit, panels, load calculations, code, inspections — and job sites where nothing is ever exactly like the drawing. It taught me the habit I use in every build now: plan the run, label everything, test before you close the wall. By 2022 I'd seen what I came to see. I could wire a house, so I left to wire businesses instead — same discipline, different medium.

Extreme Entertainment changed hands, we rebranded, and I was handed the thing I actually wanted: build the bench. Over about a year and a half I trained 24 DJs to run events the way I ran them — setup, crowd reading, client communication, contingency plans. Two years in, the system ran without me, so I left to build my own: Beatmaster DJ, my DJ company, plus the mentorship program that keeps that training going.

Today it's two lanes running at once. Beatmaster DJ is the entertainment side — weddings, corporate, clubs, private events. The web studio is me personally — websites, booking systems, CRMs, and automations for small businesses. And I do installation and technical field work with Rogers, solving problems in people's homes: hardware, signal, wiring, and whatever the actual issue turns out to be once you're standing there. Grass cutting, bakery overnights, water park, playground, the trade, the booth, the keyboard — it reads like a scattered resume until you notice every one of them was the same job: show up, figure out the room, make it work.

Every small business I worked with was drowning in the same problems: ugly websites that didn't convert, broken booking flows, no automation. So I built my web studio — custom websites and AI tools, delivered in days instead of quarters, by a real human who picks up the phone. If we can't deliver, you don't pay.

Somewhere between the gigs and the mentoring, I fell hard for code. It started as a means to an end — I needed a booking site that actually worked, then a lead form, then a way to send confirmation emails without me sitting at a laptop at midnight. Every fix opened another door and I kept walking through them. My origin story with code is embarrassingly practical. I broke my own WordPress site the week of a wedding gig and had 48 hours to rebuild it. I opened the console, Googled every red error, and by the end of the weekend I'd rewritten the booking form in vanilla JS and hooked it to a Google Sheet. That was the moment it clicked — this wasn't magic, it was just plumbing you could learn. What I learned first, in order: HTML and CSS until layouts stopped fighting me, then JavaScript fundamentals (arrays, promises, fetch), then React because every tutorial pointed there, then TypeScript because I was tired of undefined at 2am, then SQL and Postgres because spreadsheets stopped scaling, then edge functions and serverless because I wanted things to run without me. Along the way: Git, the terminal, DNS, environment variables, and how to actually read a stack trace instead of panicking at it. The projects that proved I could build real systems, not toys: a full booking + deposit + calendar sync platform for my own DJ business (Stripe + Supabase + Google Calendar + Resend); a mentorship portal for The Blueprint students with gated lessons, progress tracking, and Discord role sync; a lead intake and CRM for my web clients with automated follow-ups, SLA timers, and AI-drafted replies; and hersky.info itself — this site — with a full admin CMS, screenshot bake pipeline, theme editor, and telemetry, all shipped and maintained by one person. What I love about code is that it's honest. A track either drops on the one or it doesn't. A query either returns the right row or it doesn't. Both reward the same thing: relentless iteration until it feels right.

Most of the real magic in a modern business isn't a single app — it's the plumbing between them. I now build entire systems on top of connectors: Stripe for payments, Supabase for data and auth, Resend and Postmark for email, Twilio for SMS, Google Calendar and Gmail for scheduling, Slack and Discord for internal ops, Notion and Airtable for content, OpenAI and Anthropic for AI, Zapier and n8n for the glue. A client says "I want a booking form that charges a deposit, syncs to my calendar, texts me, emails the client, and drops a row into my CRM." To me that's one afternoon of wiring — because I've already run those pipes a hundred times. I treat every integration like a soundcheck: test every cable, label every input, expect the one thing that will go wrong on show night.

Every integration I ship follows the same repeatable workflow. It looks boring on paper and that's the point — boring is what survives production. 1. Map the flow on paper first. Before I touch a keyboard I sketch every actor (customer, admin, system) and every event (form submit, payment, email, retry). If I can't draw it, I can't build it. 2. Pick the source of truth. Usually Supabase Postgres. One database, one schema, one place any question can be answered. Everything else — Stripe, Twilio, Resend, Zapier — writes back to it via webhooks so no row ever gets orphaned. 3. Wire authentication and secrets before features. API keys go in server-only env vars, never the client. Every service that can sign its webhooks (Stripe, Resend, Twilio, Zapier) gets signature verification on day one, not day thirty. 4. Build one pipe end-to-end before adding a second. If it's checkout: Stripe Checkout → webhook → Postgres row → Resend receipt → Slack ping to me. I ship that one lane completely, watch it in production for a day, then add the next lane (SMS via Twilio, calendar hold via Google, AI-drafted follow-up via OpenAI). 5. Retry, log, and alert on every hop. Every webhook handler is idempotent (safe to receive twice). Every failure writes to an audit log table with the raw payload. Every hard error pings me in Slack with the row ID so I can debug in 30 seconds, not 30 minutes. 6. Zapier and n8n as the glue, not the spine. I use them for the 20% of connections that aren't worth a custom edge function — hooking a Typeform to Notion, mirroring a Calendly booking into Airtable. The critical revenue path always stays in code I own. 7. Hand it over documented. Every system I ship comes with a one-page runbook: what breaks, where to look, what to click. You should never need to call me at 11pm — but if you do, I pick up.

A few concrete examples so "connectors" isn't just a word. — Wedding DJ onboarding, automated. A couple books a discovery call through a form on the site. Zapier catches the submission, drops a row in Supabase, holds a tentative slot in Google Calendar, sends a branded intake questionnaire via Resend, and pings me in Slack with a one-line summary. When they pay their deposit on Stripe, a webhook flips the row to "booked", confirms the calendar hold, texts them the day-of contact via Twilio, and schedules a 7-day-before reminder email. Zero manual steps between "nice to meet you" and "see you Saturday". — DJ Blueprint payments and access. Student pays through Stripe Checkout (one-time or 3-payment plan). Stripe webhook creates their Supabase account, emails a magic link via Resend, and hits the Discord API to grant the student role automatically. If a payment fails, the same pipeline flips their access off within a minute and Twilio sends me an SMS so I can reach out personally. Refunds reverse everything with one admin click. — Web client fulfillment. New lead fills out the intake form. An OpenAI call drafts a personalized proposal from their answers, saves it to Supabase, and drops the draft in my inbox for a 60-second review before Resend sends it. Once they say yes, a Zap opens a project in Notion, creates a shared Google Drive folder, and posts a kickoff message in a client-specific Slack channel — all before I've written my first line of code for them.

There's no agency behind the curtain — it's me. Beatmaster DJ is the entertainment company: weddings, corporate, clubs, private events. The web studio is me personally: websites, booking systems, CRMs, automations for small businesses. Same person, same phone number, same standard — sharp, intentional, built to last. I'm not interested in being the biggest. I'm interested in being the one you actually trust.