I don't fit in one box. Here's why I stopped trying.

Accountant. Musician. Painter. Builder. This is how it connects.

I‘m Rodney Maiato. I live in Montreal, and depending on the day, I’m either debugging a Supabase query, recording a song, or trying to paint light the way John Singer Sargent did.

Most people who find me come through one door — the accounting one, the coding one, or the art one. They’re usually surprised that the other doors exist.

Here’s how it all connects.

The accounting chapter

I spent over a decade working my way up from AP clerk to Assistant Controller, then into cost accounting and payroll across multiple provinces. I was good at it. But the whole time I was watching the same problems repeat themselves — receipts everywhere, month-end chaos, small business owners drowning in paperwork that should have been automated years ago.

So I built the thing I wished existed.

CDL Accounting Solutions is my remote bookkeeping practice based in Montreal. The real product is Docket — a client portal I built from scratch in Next.js and Supabase that handles receipt intake, month-end checklists, CRA deadlines, and document management. I built it because no off-the-shelf tool did exactly what I needed. I’m still building it, in public, while holding down a day job.

The coding chapter

I taught myself to code. I can build things — static sites, serverless functions, React components, Google Apps Script automations. I rely on AI for complex architecture, which means I spend a lot of time working with Claude Code and thinking carefully about what I’m actually trying to build before I write a line.

My stack is Mac Mini M4, Next.js, Supabase, Netlify, Cloudflare, GitHub.

The music chapter

I started playing in 1977. Dylan, Neil Young, The Beatles — that’s where it began, and honestly, that’s still where my taste lives. Well-crafted songs. Melody that means something. I play across genres — classic pop, alternative, jazz — but what I’m always chasing is a song that sounds like it couldn’t have been written any other way.

The painting chapter

A few years ago, I picked up a brush for the first time. I was drawn to impressionist realism — Sargent, Zorn, James Gurney. The way they capture light without overworking it. I’m still very much a student of it, but painting has taught me more about seeing than anything else I’ve done.

Why this Substack exists

I’m not here to teach you accounting. I’m not here to be an influencer.

I’m here because I spent 10 years frustrated by broken systems and started building my way out of them — and somewhere along the way I realized that’s actually what I do. I solve problems that annoy me. Sometimes that looks like a React component. Sometimes it looks like a painting. Sometimes it looks like a song.

If you’re building something on the side while holding everything else together, you’re in the right place.

— Rodney