Hello, World — Who Is TechFath3r?

I’m Dan. I run a small but successful electronics repair business out of Spalding, England — DannStarr Electronics, been going since 2011. iPhones, tablets, laptops, car ECUs — if it has a circuit board and someone’s broken it, we’ve probably seen it.

I’ve always enjoyed taking things apart. It just wasn’t until adulthood that I started putting them back together.

From Cracked Screens to Motherboards

When iPhones were still new — before YouTube tutorials and iFixit guides existed — I was in the trenches figuring out screen refurbishment from scratch. Taking a shattered laminated LCD and making it look factory-new again. That was proper dark arts territory at the time.

From there the obsession deepened. Board-level repair is a different beast entirely. When you’ve got an iPhone motherboard on the bench that the manufacturer says is dead, and you trace the fault down to a single component, reball it, and it boots — that’s a hard feeling to beat.

The Jump to Software

The love of technology was never just hardware. I was always curious about what made computers tick — the logic underneath everything.

I’m self-taught, and still learning every day. What I find fascinating is how similar the fundamentals of electronics and computer programming actually are. Both are just abstractions stacked on top of abstractions — and once you understand the base layer, you can follow the logic all the way up to whatever complex system sits at the top.

I’m now building applications, writing code, and working my way deeper into computer science. The area I’m most drawn to is cyber security research — the intersection of understanding systems deeply enough to find where they break.

RepairKeeper

My first real production app is RepairKeeper. It’s the software I always wanted when I was running the workshop — job tracking, customer management, workflow tools built specifically for repair businesses.

The difference between RepairKeeper and every other generic CRM I tried? I built it because I needed it. I use it every day to run DannStarr Electronics. That feedback loop makes it better than anything built by someone who’s never had a customer standing at the counter asking where their phone is.

AI — Friend, Tool, or Impending Overlord?

I’m working with AI every day. Not in a hype-cycle way — in a this is genuinely useful and I want to understand both what it can do and where it falls flat kind of way.

The productivity gains are real. The weaknesses are also real. I’m interested in both.

As for when the machines take over — I’ve been looking for a live countdown. If you find one, send it over.

Why This Site?

Part log, part showcase, part thinking out loud. I’m building things and I want a place to document the journey — the repair work, the software projects, the homelab experiments, the CTF rabbit holes, the AI observations.

If any of that sounds interesting, stick around.