I’m Meyer Oppelt.
I’m a developer in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I spend my working hours writing software for someone else and my evenings building the things under this name. Oppelt LLC exists so those things have somewhere to live that isn’t a side project folder.
Before this I built websites, mostly WordPress, for a few years. That work taught me what small businesses actually put up with in their software. It is also work I am finishing up: the products are where the attention goes now.
RouteBill is the first thing I’ve built that I intend to still be running in ten years. It is small on purpose, it is supported by me, and it will not be sold out from under the people using it. If a second product ever makes sense, it will be held the same way.
Seven principles, and really only one idea.
Power and hostility got conflated somewhere along the way. Enterprise software earned its reputation by being deep and unusable at once, so people assume the depth requires the pain. It does not. Keep every ounce of the power, and throw away all of the pain.
- 01
Power and usability are not a tradeoff
A system can carry enormous complexity and still feel effortless. Any friction you feel is a design failure, not proof the system is serious.
- 02
The complexity is real, but it isn’t yours to carry
Regulatory rules, data integrity, integrations and security models stay fully intact under the hood. Nothing gets dumbed down. What changes is who holds the weight.
- 03
Make decisions, don’t offer choices
Consumer apps feel like magic because they act on your behalf and are usually right. Every decision the software makes correctly is one you never have to understand.
- 04
Opinionated defaults are where the expertise lives
Configurability is often an excuse to have no point of view, which quietly dumps the expertise back onto you. The right thing to do should also be the path of least resistance.
- 05
Guide the path, don’t hand over a manual
Structure, prompts and pre-built scaffolding beat documentation. Arrange the system so the next step is obvious and the wrong step is hard to take.
- 06
Automate the procedure, expose only the outcome
You should experience a result, not a sequence of steps. Anything repetitive, mechanical or error-prone belongs to the machine.
- 07
Correctness is invisible when it works, unavoidable when it matters
The system quietly enforces the rules, so compliance, validation and integrity are the byproduct of normal use rather than something to remember.
Carry the full weight of an enterprise system so completely that the only person who ever feels it is the builder, and the user gets a phone app that happens to be right about everything.
The company
- Entity
- Oppelt LLC
- Formed
- 2026
- Based in
- Sioux Falls, SD