Jimenez Julien, the person behind this weather log

Why he built a log for weather days

The first version of RainDelayLog was a spreadsheet built for one general contractor in the Gulf Coast region who had lost eleven days of time extension on a distribution center. Nobody disputed that it had rained. The problem was that the daily reports said very little, the notice letters went out late, and the only person who remembered which crews had been sent home was a superintendent who had since moved to another job. Jimenez Julien sat with that team for two weeks, read the delay clause of the contract line by line, and rebuilt what the record should have looked like. Two of those eleven days came back. The other nine were unrecoverable, and that gap is what turned a favor into a product.

He is not a builder, and he says so early in every conversation. His background is software for small operators: the kind of company where the same person signs the contract, runs the schedule, and answers the phone at seven in the morning. What he brings to commercial construction is a habit of watching how work actually gets recorded, then removing every field on a form that nobody was ever going to fill out honestly at the end of a wet shift. That is why the field entry in this product is short, why the photo requirement is one tap, and why the classification of a day is made by a rule rather than by asking a tired superintendent to render a legal judgment about his own job.

Building for this trade taught him three things he did not expect. The first is that the argument is almost never about rainfall, it is about the baseline and the critical path, so the product had to carry ten year county normals and activity mapping from day one. The second is that notice deadlines lose more days than bad weather does, which is why the countdown sits on the dashboard where a project executive cannot miss it. The third is that no superintendent will adopt a tool that adds work, so the product had to be faster than the text message it replaced. Anything that failed that test got cut.

He works directly with the operators who use this. A first call is a screen share where a real past weather stretch from your job gets logged live, not a slide deck. He reads the delay and notice language in your contract before writing your threshold rules, and if your risk manager wants a change to the packet layout, that request goes to him and not into a queue. Roughly one week a month is spent on the phone with general contractors, schedulers and claims consultants, and those conversations set the build order for the following month.

Experience and expertise

• Fourteen years building operational software for small and mid sized businesses in the United States and Europe, always for teams without an IT department.
• Four years working specifically on construction documentation, including daily reporting, delay classification and time extension packets.
• Direct work with general contractors, construction managers, schedulers and claims consultants in Florida, Colorado, Missouri, Texas and the Carolinas.
• Working knowledge of the standard delay and notice clauses in the common US industry contract forms, and how a reviewer reads them.
• Director of MLJ, SASU, the company that publishes RainDelayLog and a small family of tools for operators in specific trades.

How this product is built and maintained

Every claim on this site traces to a number in customer reporting, and the figures are refreshed once a quarter rather than left to age quietly. Testimonials are published with the full name, title, company and city of the person who gave them, and each one was approved in writing before it went live. When a statistic changes, the sentence changes with it, and if a feature is retired it comes off this page in the same week.

Product work follows the same standard. Weather data comes from public National Weather Service reporting stations, and the raw observations are archived nightly so a record can be defended years after a job closes. Changes to threshold logic are versioned, dated and visible in the account, because a rule that quietly shifts would undermine the packets built before it. Support email is answered by the person who wrote the feature, and there is no queue between you and him.

What he is accountable for

He owns the accuracy of the documentation this product produces, the security of the records it holds, and the honesty of the claims made on this website. He does not offer legal advice, and a delay packet is evidence rather than a guarantee that an owner will grant the day. What he does promise is that the packet contains the source data, the contract threshold and the field record, assembled the way a reviewer expects to receive them.

Contact the author

Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com with the job name in the subject line, and expect a written reply within one business day. If you would rather show than describe, book a screen share from the contact section and bring a month that hurt. Questions about billing, data handling or contract language all land in the same inbox.