Should You Build It Yourself?
An honest decision framework. The maintenance burden, the bus factor, and the questions to answer before you write anything.
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Build · Automate · Connect
Build It Yourself
AI-assisted development and low-code tools have changed what a technically curious fire or EMS professional can build without a traditional software team. That creates real opportunity for administrative tools, dashboards, prototypes and automation. It also creates risk when internally developed software begins touching sensitive data, operational decisions or mission-critical systems. The question this track keeps returning to is not just whether you can build it. It is whether you should build it, who will maintain it, and what happens when the person who built it leaves.
In this track
When You Should NOT Build It Yourself
Some problems carry too much operational, clinical, personnel, records, cybersecurity or lifecycle risk to treat as an internal coding experiment.
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Building Internal Tools with AI Assistance
What tools like Claude Code and Lovable make possible for someone who is not a developer, using a real example.
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Connecting the Systems You Already Have
Pulling data out of CAD and RMS through their APIs, and automating the reporting nobody wants to do by hand.
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Security, Privacy, and Authentication Before You Build
The questions to answer before the first line of code: what data the tool touches, who can reach it, where it lives, and what happens if it is compromised.
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Build It So Someone Else Can Maintain It
Documentation, ownership, authentication, backups, dependencies, source control, and the handoff plan every internally developed tool needs.
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Workshop: Build a Department Dashboard in a Day
A hands-on session taking a group from incident export to a working dashboard their department can use.
Workshop
Tell us what is missing
Pieces with a reading list point at the clearest outside treatment of the subject we could find and verify. If something here is wrong, missing, or in the wrong order for how a department actually works, that is worth knowing now.
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