About Your Friendly Developer

Hi. I'm Jason Ramirez. This is why I built this.

I'm not going to pretend this started with a vision board or a business plan. It started in a storage shed in Salinas in 2013, when I was thirty-seven years old with nothing to my name and nowhere to be.

I'd been homeless for two years. Living out of my truck, sleeping in a shed behind my son's grandmother's house. The last two years of my drinking and using looked like that. On September 27th, 2013, I got sober. Got a bed in a treatment facility. That's where my life actually started.

What nobody tells you about early recovery is how broke it is. Not just financially broke, though that too. Broke in every way. No credit. No savings. No plan. No idea what retirement even meant for someone like me. I was going to work until I died. That was the whole plan.

Then I got my first laptop.

I'd been working at the treatment center where I got sober. Went from client to overnight staff when my old counselor, who had become the director, offered me the job. He saw something in me I couldn't see yet. I walked through that door feeling like a complete fraud. I walked through it anyway.

On my days off I started trying to figure out how to make money online. I tried probably a hundred different things over the next thirteen years. None of them worked. Not because the ideas were bad, because I'm an addict, and addicts chase shiny objects. I'd start something, get excited about something else, abandon the first thing, chase the new thing. Repeat. For over a decade.

What finally changed it wasn't willpower. It was everything I'd learned in recovery, and in the mental health field working with clients, and fixing my own credit from scratch without anyone's help, and figuring out the tax system after years of not filing, and slowly, painfully, teaching myself SEO, then content strategy, then AI and LLM optimization, then UI design that actual humans enjoy using.

Thirteen years of self-education. Every skill on these sites I learned the hard way because I had to.

I built these tools because people like me needed them and couldn't afford them. People who are starting over. People who are broke and scared and trying to figure out a system that was never explained to them. People who need real information without the paywall, without the condescension, without the assumption that they already know what they're doing.

I still work a full-time job. I'm pursuing my Bachelor of Social Work with plans for my MSW. I take photos. And when I get home or get done with school work, I come here. This is the other thing that turns me on and settles me down at the same time. There's something about building something useful that hits different when you spent years building nothing.

Your Friendly Developer is my LLC. I am the developer. This is my work.

If you're looking for the guy behind these sites, it's me. A CADC-II counselor, a self-taught web builder, a recovering addict with over twelve years of sobriety, a guy who fixed his own credit and figured out his own taxes and is still figuring out everything else one day at a time.

I'm not a corporation. I'm not a content farm. I'm one person who lived a lot of the things these tools are about.

That's why I built them.

About MindCheck Tools

I spent years working in addiction counseling and mental health — first as a client, then as a certified counselor. I hold my CADC-II credential and have worked with clients in inpatient treatment, outpatient programs, and community mental health settings. I know what it feels like to sit across from someone in the worst moment of their life. I know what it feels like to be that person.

I built MindCheck Tools because free, private, clinically-grounded mental health screening shouldn't require an insurance card or a $200 copay to access. Every tool here is reviewed for clinical accuracy. Every page has crisis resources. Every result comes with a reminder that this is a starting point, not a diagnosis.

If you're struggling right now: 988 (call or text). Crisis Text Line: text HOME to 741741. SAMHSA: 1-800-662-4357. You don't have to figure it out alone.

For clinical credentials and reviewed tools, see Jason Ramirez, CADC-II →