About
The person behind Orbit MD.
Hi, I'm John Spurgin
I'm a freelance web application developer with over 20 years in the industry, building scalable, user-friendly web apps for everyone from startups to large organisations — over the years that's included the likes of Diageo and Tesco, alongside a range of studios and science companies. I mostly work in React, Node, Go, Gatsby and TypeScript, and I'm happiest making tools that take something fiddly and make it feel simple.
Why I built Orbit MD
Honestly? Years of wrestling with big CMS platforms. They tend to hand users far more freedom than they need — enough to break the very designs I'd carefully built. WordPress is the one I've bumped into most, with its sprawl of plugins that anyone can add and few keep updated. I wanted content editing that stays inside the guardrails: edit the words and the data, not the design.
I really like how git-based tools such as Decap and Tina CMS work — the content lives in the repo, and you get the git workflow I love: clean commits, real history, easy rollbacks. What I didn't want was yet another online account for someone to log into. So Orbit MD keeps it local: a desktop app that reads your site's own schema, gives editors a friendly form instead of raw files, and commits to a branch the safe way — the git workflow's safety net, without asking anyone to learn git or sign in to one more thing.
What else I make — SlashStar
Orbit MD is one of the things I make. I also run SlashStar — a minimalist developer apparel store inspired by real code: well-made tees carrying snippets like if err != nil and .unwrap(), for people who see a bit of beauty in syntax. Same idea as Orbit, really — care about the details, no shortcuts, no noise.