I go and read
the actual data.
I'm Brendon Jensen, a web developer in Utah. I build the site and the machine behind it — the theme, the forms, the automations that move a submission somewhere useful, and the marketing pages a team can change without asking anyone.
Most of what I work on already exists and is already broken in some specific way. That suits me. The interesting part of this job has never been the greenfield build — it's working out why something that should work doesn't.
Not what
it seemed.
Three separate projects, three unrelated stacks, and the same shape every time: the obvious explanation was wrong, and the real cause only showed up once I stopped trusting it and went looking.
- 01
Rally Trailer MFG
What it looked like
Dealer portal changes that wouldn’t stay saved — trailers vanishing from a lot, lead statuses reverting to New — and I couldn’t reproduce it.
It worked every time for me. My admin session kept getting a freshly generated page; the people using the portal were getting cached ones.
What it actually was
The host’s LiteSpeed cache was serving logged-in users cached portal pages with old security tokens, so WordPress correctly rejected their saves with a 403. The save code was fine.
- 02
ALL IN Tournament
What it looked like
Right after I shipped a fix for the Shop link, opening Shop in a new tab or reloading it sent people back to the homepage. Clicking Shop from the homepage still worked.
Every test passed on my machine. It only failed on a fresh production build that never opened the homepage first.
What it actually was
The Shop page checked a value that only the homepage set, and it lived in server state shared between visitors, so once anyone loaded the homepage the check passed. It now uses the flag the server loads for every request.
- 03
PROLOOK
What it looked like
A fix that worked locally and refused to appear in production.
The deployed file and the local file were identical, byte for byte. Correct source, wrong output.
What it actually was
Blade compiles templates to PHP and caches them by source path. The host was executing a stale compiled copy no cache tool could reach. Giving the section a new path forced a fresh compile.
None of those were solved by knowing a framework. They were solved by refusing the first explanation and going to look at the evidence — the network requests and response headers, a byte-for-byte diff, a fresh production build that never opened the homepage. That's the part I'd want someone to hire me for, and it's the part that transfers to a stack I haven't met yet.
What I do.
Development
The part I get hired for.
Custom WordPress themes on ACF rather than page builders, Astro for static sites, and whatever a project already runs on. I inherit a lot of other people’s code and I try to leave it better than the last person did.
Automation
The part almost nobody asks for and everybody needs.
Form-driven approval workflows, lead routing, Zapier pipelines that survive contact with real submissions. Low-code where low-code works, and real code exactly where it stops working.
Marketing
Why the site exists in the first place.
Most of my work is for marketing teams, so the brief usually arrives as a number rather than a page. My favorite version of this job is making a marketing team stop needing me for small things.
Design
Enough to take a handoff properly, or to do it myself.
I work from Figma and can carry a design the last mile without losing what made it good. When there isn’t a designer, I’m the one who decides what it looks like.
Half of
The Twilight Trekkers.
My wife Kaylee and I started The Twilight Trekkers in 2021. It's an outdoor photography and travel brand with 26k followers on Instagram. She's our photographer. I write the blog, build and run the website and its SEO, fly and edit the drone videos, shoot some of the photos and videos, and do most of the route planning and logistics.
Half Dome, the Narrows, Ribbon Falls, the Grand Canyon, North Cascades, Olympic, canyoneering in southern Utah. Shot on a Canon M200, a DJI Mini 3 Pro, a GoPro and an Insta360.
It isn't a side project I keep quiet about. It's where I learned SEO properly, where I found out what a content model has to survive, and where I get to be the client for once — which has made me a considerably better one to work with.
Education and
certifications.
Universal Studies
Minors in Digital Media and Criminal Justice
Utah Valley University
Certificates
Web Design
Web Development
HTML, CSS, JavaScript
Social Media Certified
HubSpot Academy
Influencer Marketing 1, Industry Specialist
Certificate of Achievement
Meltwater Academy
Canyoneering
Canyoneering 1 and 2
American Canyoneering Association
Canyoneering Level 1 and 2
V7 Academy
Recognition
Certificate of Excellence
Lincoln Academy · 18 May