Studio
Short & Stout is me, plus trusted collaborators when a project needs them. You always talk to the person writing the code.
About · Founder
Travis
Potter.
Founder and lead developer of Short & Stout Studios. I design and build websites, apps and software for businesses in Houston and beyond, and I keep them running after launch.
The short version
I came to software the long way round: through server rooms, support queues and on-call nights. That’s why I build things that stay up.
Eleven years in infrastructure taught me what breaks in production and why. Now I put that to work for small businesses and founders. A moving company that needed complete quotes. An entertainment brand that wanted to edit its own site. A music social network. A webcam tabletop platform. A multiplayer game on Steam.
I use AI-assisted development every day, and I’ll tell you exactly where it speeds things up and where it doesn’t. It’s a big part of how one developer delivers what used to take a team.
Timeline
From the server room
to the studio.
- 2015
Softlayer, an IBM company
Started in customer support: Linux servers, DNS, cPanel, firewalls. Promoted to lead a shift of about ten technicians, then moved to Advanced Customer Support for virtualization and containers.
- 2020
A datacenter in a Pelican case
Seven Raspberry Pis, a switch and three fans in a CNC-cut case, provisioned with Ansible: firewall, web servers, storage, database, Grafana monitoring and backups. Built for fun; it taught me how all the pieces meet.
- 2020
HCL America · IBM Cloud Object Storage
DevOps work in Ansible and Jenkins, then product lead for a new internal VPN service: Kubernetes, LDAP, GSLB, Citrix NetScalers and the documentation to hand it over.
- 2022
Innova Solutions · enterprise IT
Kept that VPN service running across a fleet of 30+ servers, and built automation for enterprise security teams in Excel, VBA, Power Automate and SharePoint.
- 2024
Aux'd
Started a music social network on Django, React and Apple MusicKit: communities, shared playlists and daily music games.
- 2025
First client sites
Pixel Forge Arcade, a Houston VR rental company, and Handlebar Roofing, with a page for every service homeowners search for.
- 2026
Gridhammer ships on Steam
Led a five-person team at Pixel Forge Entertainment from design doc to early access in July and full release in September, on Windows, macOS and Linux.
- 2026
Short & Stout Studios, LLC
Diamant Noir Entertainment and Stack Haus Movers go live, and Top Down Tabletop launches as a studio product.
Three worlds
Studio. Servers. Stage.
Each one gives me real users to build for, and a reason to care that it works on the night.
Servers
Eleven years in infrastructure and IT operations. I know what breaks in production, so I build things that stay up and tell me when they don’t.
Stage
I DJ bass and house around Houston and run a TouchDesigner VJ rig. Software that has to work on the night is software I take seriously.
From the archive
Before the glasses.
Same guy, more hair. I’ve always liked framing things. These days it’s mostly screens.
The name
Short & Stout.
My friends call me T Pot. T Pot became teapot, and teapot became the studio. Like the Brown Betty, it isn’t fancy: round, sturdy, and it pours every time. That’s the standard I hold the work to.
Toolbox
What I build with.
I pick the tool for the job, not the other way round. These are the ones I ship with most.
Front end
- Astro
- React
- TypeScript
- HTML & CSS
- Tailwind
Back end
- Django
- Node.js
- Fastify
- PHP
- MySQL
Apps & games
- Godot 4
- Electron
- WebRTC
- Steamworks
- MusicKit
Infrastructure
- Linux
- Apache
- Kubernetes
- Ansible
- Grafana
Automation
- Power Automate
- SharePoint
- VBA
- Python
- Claude Code