I built my first inventory and orders system for my uncle's garage as a teenager. VB5, backed by CSV files, held together with more optimism than architecture. It tracked parts, suppliers, jobs, invoices, and all the little frictions that make the automotive world run or stall.

It worked. Twenty-five years later the stack is Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Azure — but the lesson from the garage still holds: software succeeds when it respects the mess it is replacing.