Miles HuffmanBook a Fractional Engagement
[00]Selected work

Brands I've scaled.
Tools I've built.

Two operating companies on opposite ends of the commerce spectrum — dense surplus catalog and slick product-led DTC — and the bespoke production software running underneath.

[01]Operating & design case studies

Swiss Link Military Surplus

Authentic military surplus & outdoor goods · since 1996

swisslink.com

A Northern California institution sourcing authentic, issued surplus from Switzerland, Britain, Germany and across Europe — alongside Wavian USA (the NATO-issue fuel can brand I established in the States and distribute through Swiss Link), Swiss Link Classic Wool, MOLLE/ALICE load-bearing systems, and emergency food. The operational reality is staggering catalog complexity: thousands of one-of-a-kind surplus SKUs, a parallel wholesale channel, and modern manufactured lines, all running on one unified, self-owned enterprise stack.

Migration4 systems → 1Timeline3 months, soloComplexity & cost↓ 10×

Challenges solved

  1. 01

    Inventory complexity at scale

    Surplus is the hardest possible inventory problem — irregular lots, variable conditions, and SKUs that never restock. I built the operational and financial controls to keep retail, wholesale, and Wavian USA distribution reconciled against a single source of truth in Odoo.

  2. 02

    Single-handed CRM/ERP/WMS consolidation — in three months

    I planned and executed the entire enterprise migration myself, in three months: from a fragmented stack of rented SaaS — Salesforce, Accounting Seed, Shopify — into a single unified Odoo system the business owns outright, spanning CRM, ERP, and WMS. Collapsing four disconnected vendors into one source of truth cut operational complexity, SaaS dependency, and cost by a literal order of magnitude — done under live operational load, with zero tolerance for corrupting pricing, accounting, or stock data.

  3. 03

    One self-owned stack across retail + wholesale

    Retail (swisslink.com), wholesale (swisslinkwholesale.com), and Wavian USA distribution now run on that one consolidated Odoo platform — storefront, inventory, accounting, and back office on a single source of truth the company owns, instead of four vendors fighting each other for a monthly bill.

  4. 04

    Dense, high-utility catalog UI

    A surplus catalog has to surface authenticity, origin, era, and condition fast. The UI is intentionally information-dense — built so a serious buyer can scan dozens of unique pieces and trust what they're seeing, rather than a sparse lifestyle storefront.

Design execution

Editorial product storytelling (Bundesmarine deck jackets, Italian Vegetato history) layered over a high-density grid — utility-first hierarchy that respects how surplus buyers actually shop.

Odoo ERPOdoo CRMOdoo WMSOdoo CommerceWholesale portalWavian USA (in-house brand)

Hyphan

Earn from your idle GPU · a distributed AI compute network

hyphan.io

A frontier-tech product I built solo and am proud of: Hyphan turns idle consumer gaming PCs into a distributed network for AI inference. A one-click, code-signed Windows app routes inference jobs to an RTX 30/40-series GPU only when it's idle, pauses instantly the moment you start gaming, and pays out via Stripe — no mining, no crypto, no touching your games or files.

Power cap75%Thermal lock85°CPayoutsStripe

Challenges solved

  1. 01

    Trust is the entire product

    Asking someone to run inference on their personal machine demands airtight, legible safety: a 75% power cap, an 85°C thermal lock, and an isolated CUDA process with no filesystem access and no network reach beyond an encrypted tunnel. Renters are completely blind to the host. The positioning leads with that guarantee.

  2. 02

    Zero-friction onboarding

    The supply side is non-technical gamers, so the funnel is built for 'three steps, no terminal': a code-signed installer, a daemon that auto-starts to a small tray icon, and an earnings dashboard. Free to install, free to uninstall, toggle off and reclaim 100% of the hardware instantly.

  3. 03

    Real payment rails, not points

    Earnings accrue against hourly grid-demand rates and pay out through Stripe — the same rails as Shopify, Lyft, and DoorDash — straight to a bank once the balance clears $10. Credible economics, not a speculative token.

Design execution

A confident frontier-tech landing flow: the hero leads with the earning promise, immediately backed by hard safety specs (power cap, thermal lock, isolation) so skepticism is disarmed before it forms — trust engineering as marketing.

Distributed computeCUDA inferenceWindows daemonStripe payoutsCode signing

StormBag

The original sandless sandbag · As seen on Shark Tank

stormbag.co

A modern, product-led DTC brand for flood protection. StormBags weigh one pound dry and expand to 33+ lbs in 3–5 minutes when submerged — a reusable, FEMA/National Guard-trusted alternative to traditional sandbags. I co-founded and scaled the brand, successfully bringing it to Shark Tank and securing a $200K deal with Mark Cuban and Lori Greiner, and built the e-commerce engine on Shopify.

Shark Tank$200K dealDry → wet1 lb → 33 lbMade inUSA

Challenges solved

  1. 01

    Crystal-clear value proposition

    An unfamiliar product needs instant comprehension. The brand leads with the single hero claim — 'No Sand, No Shovels' — backed by the visceral 1 lb → 33 lb transformation demo, so the value lands in seconds.

  2. 02

    High-converting kit-based flow

    Rather than selling loose units, the catalog is packaged into outcome-based kits (door kits, garage kits, cases of 10/25). This reframes the purchase around the problem solved, lifts average order value, and simplifies the path to checkout.

  3. 03

    Post-Shark-Tank scale spike

    The episode sold out inventory in a week and drove a viral TikTok surge. The storefront and fulfillment had to absorb a sudden national demand spike without breaking — an operations stress test passed live.

Design execution

A slick, modern product-led landing flow: bold hero, demonstrative imagery, benefit-led copy, and a frictionless kit-to-cart path — the polar opposite of the dense surplus catalog, tuned entirely for conversion.

Shopify Online Store 2.0Liquid themeDTC checkoutSEO
[02]Bespoke AI engineering

Production tooling, reverse-engineered from the source.

These are real, deployed systems from my GitHub — with CI/CD, versioning, and tests. Every detail below is drawn directly from the repository source, not a pitch deck.

Swiss Link Merchandiser

odoo-merchant-feed· v1.3.0-beta

Operational control plane over a live Odoo ERP

Business ROI

Collapses a manual, multi-hour, error-prone data-export-and-publish chore into a one-click, governed, auditable pipeline — without ever putting the system of record at risk.

Logic map

Odoo (system of record)
XML-RPC · read-only RPC only
odoo_rpc.py — guarded helper
fail-closed allowlist: read / search_read / fields_get
SQLite cache (WAL mode)
raw JSON → materialize.py → typed tables
Feed publishers + automations
Google / Meta / dropship · replenishment & win-back

Engineering highlights

  • Paranoid read-only guard: once a write is attempted, every subsequent RPC latches closed until explicitly cleared — governance encoded as code, even enforced on the AI via a Cursor rule.
  • Three-layer SQLite lock-contention defense (idle-wait, retry-with-backoff, buffered flush) so background schedulers never collide mid-run.
  • ~30+ backend domain modules, full CI/CD (3 GitHub Actions), semantic versioning, pytest + Vitest + Playwright, and a packaged Windows installer.
FastAPIReact + ViteTypeScriptTanStack QuerySQLite

The Surplus Codex

surplus-codex· production

Full-stack public knowledge base & marketplace

Business ROI

Demonstrates full-stack breadth beyond internal tooling — typed contracts end-to-end, role-gated admin, and a brand-grade themed design system.

Logic map

Shared Zod schema
one type source across client + server
Express API — ~55 routes
auth, profiles, suggestions, role-gated admin
Supabase / Postgres
versioned via SQL migration files
Typesense search
fast, typo-tolerant discovery + reindex endpoint

Engineering highlights

  • Complete themed token system in code — an 'Olive Drab + Warm Stone' palette with full light/dark sets and a deliberate Source Serif / Satoshi / Source Code Pro type pairing.
  • Full role-based access control (requireAuth / requireAdmin) gating entries, taxonomy, and reindex operations.
  • Deployed on Railway with a typed, migration-versioned schema — a real product surface, not a prototype.
React + TSExpress / NodeSupabase (Postgres)Typesense