I build systems, brands, and clarity.

I'm Jake Herscovitch — most people know me as DJ Hersky. It started when I was 12, dragging a borrowed controller into a basement and trying to figure out why two songs wouldn't beatmatch. I was obsessed. I'd stay up until 3am reading forums, ripping apart tracks to understand structure.

By 14 I was booking my first paid gigs — bar/bat mitzvahs, birthday parties, school dances. By 17 I was running sound for corporate AV teams, learning how to wire a room, mix monitors, and survive a client whose plan just blew up 20 minutes before doors.

By 20 I was working every event type you can name: weddings, clubs, lounges, water parks, festivals, brand activations, charity galas. 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.

DJs started asking how I was getting booked so consistently. So I started teaching. One student became three. Three became ten. Today I've personally mentored 24 working DJs — people who run their own businesses, headline rooms, and pay their rent with the craft.

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 BrainForge — 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 BrainForge clients with automated follow-ups, SLA timers, and AI-drafted replies; and Obsidian Logic 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. — BrainForge client fulfillment. New lead fills out the intake quiz. 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.

Obsidian Logic is the umbrella — sharp, black, intentional, built to last. Under it lives The Blueprint for DJs, BrainForge for businesses, and a growing consulting practice. I'm not interested in being the biggest. I'm interested in being the one you actually trust.