DK Media Studio

08/25/2026

I set out to rebuild my whole website from scratch this month. A day in, I looked at what I'd built, a generic dark-gradient hero block that could've come from any template site, and just laughed at myself. Put the computer to sleep and called it trash.

Slept on it. The next morning I realized the new logo and color system I'd built were genuinely good, I just didn't need to tear the whole house down to use them. So I kept the good bones of my current site and repainted instead.

Two days total start to finish, versus the week-plus it took me to do a full rebuild back in December. New logo, new colors, cleaner code, same site underneath. Sometimes the studs are fine and the problem really is just the paint.

Check out the new look: dankmediastudio.com

Read about this project: https://dankildahl.substack.com/p/sometimes-a-fresh-coat-of-paint-beats?r=nrtuo

I planned to gut the house. Two days and one bad hero block later, I painted it instead and liked the result more than the week-long rebuild before it.

08/11/2026

Ever get your best ideas mid-run, or in the shower, or blasting music too loud in the car? That's where every one of my articles actually starts, and it has nothing to do with AI.

I've been calling my process Vibe Writing. Turns out I'm not the first, but that just makes me trust the idea more. The part people get wrong: I write 70-80% of every article myself before AI ever touches it. I've actually had people accuse me of "AI slop" while pointing at a sentence that was word for word mine.

Full breakdown of my actual 4-step process: https://dankildahl.substack.com/p/i-write-in-the-shower-claude-cleans?r=nrtuo

08/08/2026

Weird thing I noticed this week, and I promise I'm not just complaining into the void here, though it's a solid backup plan if this post flops.

I've been building native Mac apps in SwiftUI for a while now, and I just wrapped a full website rebuild for the studio too. I had this whole theory going in that the native app work would eat more AI tokens, more code, more structure, more places for things to quietly go sideways. Turns out I was completely wrong. The website rebuild burned through way more tokens than any of the app work has, and it wasn't even a close race.

I don't know whether to be impressed or offended. Anyone else run into this? Curious if it's just my workflow being weird, or if web work is genuinely more token-hungry than native app development these days.

Check out the new site:
https://www.dankmediastudio.com

08/08/2026

Just gave the DKMS website a fresh coat of paint.

New logo, new color palette, real production photography on the homepage, an actual video showcase instead of links out to YouTube, and every service page rewritten from scratch.

Funny story: I actually started with a full rebuild and scrapped it halfway through, the first pass just wasn't feeling the love. Went back to the existing site and updated it properly instead. Same care, better result, a fraction of the time.

Check it out: dankmediastudio.com

08/06/2026

There's a shot you can't get from the ground, the venue from above, the full sweep of the crowd, the building itself as part of the story. That's where aerial footage comes in.

It's not an add-on service, it's part of the same production as everything else DKMS shoots, same multi-cam ground coverage, same audio, same edit. FAA Part 107 certified, so it's handled properly and within the rules every time.

If your next production could use an aerial opening or an establishing shot that actually adds something, reach out.

dankmediastudio.com

08/05/2026

Fall season is right around the corner for choirs and performing arts groups, and if you're still looking for a videographer, let's have a conversation.

Multi-cam recording, precision audio, and 25+ years of experience with live performance, not just plugging in a camera and hoping for the best. Whether it's a full choir concert or a musical production, we bring the setup that actually fits how these shows work.

If you want your fall concerts and shows captured the way they deserve, reach out.

dankmediastudio.com

08/04/2026

Ever finish a job interview process certain you had it, real strategy handed over, a full vision for the role, only to get ghosted or lose it to an internal hire? That's an extraction interview, and it happens more than people think, at companies of every size.

I've been through three. The worst one put me off job searching for many, many months. What came out the other side: two businesses, dankmediastudio.com and getochre.app, 30+ straight weeks of writing, and four native Mac apps shipped under my own software company. Still figuring out if any of it works. But it's mine now.

Full story: https://dankildahl.substack.com/p/congratulations-you-just-got-extracted?r=nrtuo

07/21/2026

I shipped a free Mac app today: ModelKeeper.

Here's the problem it solves. If you've tried more than one local AI tool, Ollama, LM Studio, Jan, GPT4All, whatever, there's a good chance you've downloaded the same multi-gigabyte model more than once without ever knowing it.

And if you've ever uninstalled one of those apps, the model files it left behind are still sitting on your drive. The app is gone. The disk space isn't.

ModelKeeper finds every local AI model on your Mac, tells you exactly how much space each source is using, flags likely duplicates across tools, and calls out orphaned models from apps you don't even have installed anymore. Every delete goes to Trash first, nothing is permanent, so there's no risk in cleaning house.

It's free. Direct download, no App Store required.

https://getochre.app/modelkeeper.php

This is a companion to the rest of the Ochre lineup, built the same way everything else at Ochre gets built: solve one problem completely, don't force anything on you that you didn't ask for.

07/21/2026

New piece on From the Trenches — and this one has been a long time coming.

I'm a technologist who ended up in marketing through osmosis. I didn't arrive with the vocabulary memorized. I learned it sideways, with a lot of "what the hell does that mean?" moments along the way.

After years of sitting in rooms full of paradigm shifts, low-hanging fruit, and people who can recite every framework but have never shipped anything — I wrote the field guide.

10 terms. 10 types. And the one question that exposes all of them.

Fair warning: you will recognize people you know. You might recognize yourself. That's kind of the point.

A Field Guide to the Words That Give You Away