Introduction

Before Bifrost, there was only Jack, and Jack started off like many tech enthusiasts—as a kid who knew nothing but wanted to know everything. At one point, I probably thought I already did. I started off at 17 working at a micro-MSP called Netlink back in 2009 and have since covered a lot of ground.

Like a lot of technical people, I hate manual work, so naturally, I automated my first big task—ripping hundreds of CDs to a NAS with Windows Media Player. It was nothing fancy, but I was very proud of myself for discovering Windows Media Player not only had a way to automatically start ripping disks as they were inserted, but it also allowed you to automatically eject them when finished. This was important because with such a boring task, I was bound to lose hours not noticing when a CD had finished.

Shortly after that, Microsoft BPOS came onto the scene and was quickly replaced with Office 365. Having spent a year in vocational school learning programming, I started developing a tool called “No Cloud Left Behind”. The premise was pretty simple: create a visual interface for interacting with PowerShell and running things against one or more tenants. There were (and still are) a lot of things that simply take longer in the portal. In a lot of ways, it was an extremely early and terrible version of CIPP, at least philosophically.

I had some major problems, though.

• I didn’t understand object orientation, so I created “objects” via an array and indexing. I never did figure out how to deal with null values!

• I obviously didn’t realize that PowerShell was already object-oriented, because I didn’t know what object-oriented even meant. The tool would essentially duplicate lines with %username% in them for every user you selected.

• When I had dreams of selling this piece of software, I didn’t realize you could just decompile the code and get the database and PayPal credentials—thankfully, I stumbled upon this before being embarrassed publicly.

Fast forward to now, I’ve covered a lot of ground since then:

• Grew at Netlink (now Covi) up to CTO and minority owner

• Completely engrossed myself in the MSP space for almost two decades

• Developed numerous successful, large-scale automations

• Written a few web apps before AI was a thing

Now, I’m ready to break out of my introverted shell a bit and share what I’ve learned, made, and will make with the community.

The Mission

The community is why most of us can do what we do every day, so the mission is simple: give back. If there’s paid software, it’ll be clearly labeled, but nearly everything is open-source (AGPL-licensed, following CIPP’s lead). The most ambitious project—Bifrost Integrations—is designed from the ground up to be open-source and community-driven.

What’s Coming

I’m currently working on a few different projects, all at different stages of completion.

Halo SQL Studio

Already available on GitHub, this was a fun weekend project. The premise is that Halo is a pretty powerful product that gives you full access to your database for reporting. There are a few catches:

• There are plans to get rid of direct SQL access at some point (this isn’t imminent, just my excuse to write this software).

• Developing reports in the portal is a chore.

• If you’re developing locally, you have all the limitations of SQL Views with none of the guardrails, and you can’t use variables like $clientid. This means you end up needing to set something manually, test, remember to change it, and upload it to the portal.

The goal is to have a SQL Studio-like experience with Halo features built in, like exploring the schema, searching for reports, saving new and existing reports, full-text search on your reports, and test variable substitution so you can use things like $clientid and test various scenarios without changing the query.

Halo Dispatch Portal

Also available on GitHub, a lot of us migrated from a PSA we don’t care to see again, but the one thing I—and I’m sure many others—miss is a good dispatching experience. That’s why I started writing Halo Dispatch Portal.

I won’t repeat everything here, but the aim is to get back to that best-practice workflow with calendar-based work that I’m sure many others miss as well.

Bifrost Integrations

There’s a moment in every automation journey where you realize the platform is limiting you more than helping you. You’ve invested hundreds of hours. Your workflows are complex. And as you quickly hit limitations of the platform, you start to realize how much time you’ve invested and the thought of starting again somewhere else is daunting.

Bifrost Integrations is designed to prevent that moment entirely.

You get the conveniences that make low-code appealing: OAuth flows, form builders, monitoring dashboards, multi-tenant patterns. But your actual automation logic? That’s just Python, versioned with Git. Use real debugging in VS Code. Leverage popular libraries and tooling. Let AI assistants like Claude Code write your boilerplate.

And here’s the key: you’ll never outgrow it because there’s no edge to hit. Need to build something more complex? It’s just Python—reuse your code anywhere. Bifrost itself is AGPL-licensed and built for the community, not to extract value from lock-in. Your hundreds of hours compound into skills and code you own, not technical debt trapped in someone else’s platform.

More details coming soon—this platform is still in active development, but you can follow the progress on this blog.

Follow Our Journey

Stay tuned to this blog for more updates on the various projects I’ll be working on.