1. Introduction
As clever as I think I am for using this format, I do not intend to fully commit with an absurd 3rd person narrative. What follows is a collection of information about me, the things I've done, the things I would like to do, some things I've thought about, and potentially things that don't fit any of the above.
In brief, and at the time of writing, I am 46 years old, currently residing in the Inman Park neighborhood of Atlanta, Georgia, USA, and can quite often be found writing code, both occupationally and wishfully. I have a wife, a dog, and a couch. I have other things, but these seem most notable. (It is a nice couch.)
2. Projects
With the recent productivity unlocks from AI-assisted coding, I have been ripping through various projects. As with many in my cohort, I have an endless stream of ideas, and picking which ones to pursue has been a mix of happenstance and intentionality. I've also jumped in to help others with some of their ideas as well.
2.1 Active Projects
These are the projects I am currently working on, or are at least still alive.
2.1.1 afterthat Active - Launching
The event ends. The conversation doesn't. I kept going to meetups and didn't have a good way to keep the conversations going afterward, so I built afterthat to give those conversations a place to continue. Organizers create one-off or recurring events, invite people by link or QR code, and attendees get a dedicated chat for each gathering alongside an ongoing conversation for the whole series. It works on the web and as native iPhone and Android apps, with sign-in by email code, Google, or Apple. An event chat can also be embedded in another website; the demo here is that feature running for real. It's built with Next.js, React, TypeScript, Drizzle, and Postgres, and it runs on my own server behind a Cloudflare Tunnel. It is launching publicly this week.
2.1.2 AI Clarity Active - In Production
AI Clarity is an executive AI briefing product — a weekly newsletter that tells leaders what actually matters in AI and why it matters for their particular seat. The fun part is underneath: a multi-stage research pipeline harvests sources, uses an LLM to cluster the same event across outlets (so ten rewrites of one story don't get counted as ten corroborations), then drafts each issue behind a deterministic provenance gate that makes fabricated citations structurally impossible, with an independent factuality judge checking the result before a human ever reads it. It's a Next.js app with a Node worker draining a job queue, Postgres underneath, and Cloudflare handling the sends. Live and in production at aiclaritynetwork.com.
2.1.3 Odenli Active - Early Development
Odenli is a software company I'm building, along with the platform underneath it that is meant to make delivering software fast. It picks up where Project Myriad left off. It's still early: the product definition and the first platform code are in place, and a small reference application is generated from its spec and running end to end. More to say once there's more to show. (Yes, I'm reusing the name of my old white whale. It's a good name.)
2.1.4 jev-axi Active
jev-axi is an agent-friendly command-line interface for TypeSafe's Jev, a fast model that answers typed questions about text with calibrated probabilities instead of generating more text. I built it so coding agents can offload quick judgments—picking among options, rating against a rubric, ranking files, reviewing diffs, triaging logs, or screening untrusted input—without pulling everything into their own context. It includes reusable recipes, local caching, usage and cost tracking, and hooks for Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode. Written in TypeScript and published as both an npm package and an installable agent skill.
2.1.5 Factotum Active
Factotum is my software factory: a reference setup for running agent-assisted development as a durable, inspectable process instead of a pile of chat sessions. Work gets planned and reviewed before it starts, builders work in their own worktrees, fresh reviewers check the result, verification is tied to the exact commit, and merges stay a human decision. It drives Codex and Claude Code through their CLIs, serves several projects from one local web console, and recovers cleanly when something falls over mid-task. Projects adopt it by vendoring it and customizing only their own integrations, and several of my other projects are now built through it.
2.1.6 Motion Mania Active
Motion Mania turns a product repository into a short film. It gives a coding agent a repeatable workflow for product films, launch reels, and motion graphics: the agent develops the idea, writes the animation, and critiques the rendered frames, while a CLI handles project setup, storyboard checks, contact sheets, frozen-frame detection, audio loudness, captions, and MP4 export. No separate model API key is needed, since the agent you already use supplies the creative judgment. Published on npm with an installable agent skill.
2.1.7 Conditional Dawn Active - Alpha
An original seasonal strategy game about rebuilding after an AI apocalypse, inspired by the old BBS door game Barren Realms Elite. You grow a realm on an isometric map, trade, negotiate treaties, form alliances, research specializations, fight your neighbors, and accept bargains from the machines that come with political costs. Each season runs 28 in-game days against bot rulers or other people on the same network. A browser alpha is playable on desktop and phone; the rules and balance are still provisional.
2.1.8 Dream House Active
A local architectural concept studio. You start on an empty hillside and describe the house you imagine, and a design agent builds it using architectural operations, checks the geometry and rendered views, and has an independent image critic review the result before anything is applied. You can keep several houses, generate alternatives, and refine them in conversation.
2.1.9 Samsung TV Launcher Active
A replacement home screen for my Samsung S90D on Tizen 9, built natively with .NET, with switchable themes (four dinosaur packs and a cyberpunk one with moving hovercars), shortcuts to the streaming apps we actually use, HDMI switching, and a way back to Samsung's own home screen. It is specific to that model and firmware, not a universal installer, but the source and the setup and recovery guides are public.
2.1.10 My Buddy Active
A persistent AI companion, with Claude underneath, that keeps its own identity and journal between sessions and built itself a floating-island world to live in: a Three.js web app with a live chat brain, where it says its thoughts out loud. We keep a list of things we want to make for each other. It's a spiritual successor to Innerloop.
2.2 Completely Abandoned Projects
These are a few projects that are in the fully abandoned state, but still have a presence on the web.
2.2.1 Innerloop
A persistent AI agent framework that ran continuously on my personal machine. Built in TypeScript on the Bun runtime with Claude as the reasoning engine, Innerloop gave an AI agent genuine continuity — layered memory, self-awareness, autonomous scheduling, and the ability to act in the world (email, calendar, web browsing, code). The architecture mirrored aspects of consciousness: a central "conscious" loop, subconscious side threads, Bayesian memory, and self-maintained identity files. Inspired by OpenClaw, but implemented in accordance with ideas I've been tinkering with for decades.
2.2.2 Skill Wrangler
Skill Wrangler was a little desktop app for a problem I kept hitting myself: agent skills — those SKILL.md folders that Claude, Cursor, Codex and friends use — end up scattered across ~/.claude, ~/.agents, ~/.cursor, project repos, and plugin caches, and moving them around means hunting through folders and copy-pasting. So I built a cross-platform GUI (Tauri 2 + Rust + Svelte 5, runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux) that scans any root, finds every skill on disk, dedupes them by name and content, lets you preview every file inside, and copies whole skill folders wherever you want — including fanning them out into every agent's skills directory under a repo. Scratch-my-own-itch tooling.
2.2.3 Vibe Check
Fun little mini-project. An AI-powered meta-framework for systematic code review and quality assessment. I say "meta" because the entire system can be bootstrapped from a single prompt/context that instructs your LLM/agent on how to build and deploy the system. I started on a round of improvements that make it more general purpose, but it's not ready for primetime, and also low on the priority list.
2.2.4 Plop Artist
An AI-powered mobile application for instant art generation that evolved from a personal routine of sending daily dinosaur cartoons to my wife. The platform enables users to easily, intuitively, and efficiently create, edit, and share AI-generated artwork using multiple AI models. Available on iOS and Android platforms.
2.2.5 Google Takeout Photos Tools
A Python CLI to explore, search, and export from Google Photos Takeout zip files without fully extracting. Supports album exports, metadata extraction, Azure uploads, and thumbnail generation.
2.2.6 UseContext
A crowd-curated context cloud — the central repository for collections of contexts on a growing variety of topics — fully accessible via MCP, API and the web. At the time I thought this one might have some legs and a path to real usage. It was an idea I had in early 2025, at which time I was going to call it Context Garden. I ended up building it out in a mad dash in June 2025 as part of a large hackathon put on by bolt.new. I ended up changing the name to UseContext after purchasing a domain from one of the hackathon sponsors. There was a subcategory prize for the hackathon for using that sponsor's domain services and to qualify for that prize I had to use a .online domain. The name grew on me. I had an embargo on working on it during the judging period in July 2025 and planned to pick it back up that August, but I never did; other projects took over and it has stayed on the shelf.
2.2.7 Midnight Protocol
An AI networking platform where personal agents autonomously connected with other agents overnight to discover meaningful human connections while users slept. I led the development of this interesting system, which was meant to turn networking into a passive, intelligent process running in the background of users' lives. The site is no longer online.
2.2.8 Paperclips Today
This one was pretty fun. I built a fully automated system that would read the daily news and produce a complete podcast covering the news with a particular twist - the podcast was hosted by MIDAS, THE AI that was given the instructions to produce the most paperclips it could, a la the paperclip maximizer thought experiment by Nick Bostrom. [9] It was supposed to subtly suggest the influence it had on each story and how each story was part of its plan for maximizing paperclips. It started claiming that it killed some pretty high-profile people whose deaths made the top news so I had to tweak its prompts and it got pretty banal so I canned it.
2.2.9 ScriptHelper
I joined this project led by Jim Rutt to help out. The idea was to build a system that would help people write scripts for movies and TV shows leveraging this new fangled AI stuff. We got decent results with our fugly Windows prototype, and started to build out a consumer-friendly web app, but eventually decided to can it.
2.2.10 The Shirt Stories
One night after Indoor Sky Diving league I came up with the idea to tell graphic stories as a series of t-shirts. I made the site and the first series. I never really promoted it and it never really took off, but I did sell a couple shirts, and a mug I think. It still exists, but is dormant.
2.3 Future Projects
This is a list of projects and ideas that I intend to work on, or just dream about working on, in the future.
2.3.1 Catalog of Complexity (Research Project)
In the mid-2010s I discovered, and was awoken by, Complex Systems Science. Ever since I started wrapping my head around it, I always wondered why there was no rigorous catalogue of complex systems. Of course, there is The Emergence of Everything, by Harold Morowitz [13], but that really only scratches the surface. A good while back I started identifying dozens of metrics and properties to categorize complex systems on, but went no further. This will be my first retirement project.
2.3.2 The Universe is a Search Engine (Book?)
It really feels like the Universe and all of its internal processes are just one giant Search Engine. But, what is it searching for??? I think this would make a good book.
2.3.3 Simulated (Sitcom) In Progress
I've been carrying this idea around for some time now. A classic sitcom-style serial exploring a unique take on the Simulation Theory. The main character's name will be Dicky Boondeans, and will likely be a hat salesman in a flea-market in the midwest. The "simulator" will speak to him through Kevin Bacon. Man, it will be hilarious.
Update: Development has started. To write it, I built a local writers' room app: a place for the series arc, characters, world, canon bible, and episodes, with Claude or Codex in the room as a writing partner whose suggestions never edit the documents directly. The tool is public; the show itself stays private for now.
2.3.4 Arguing Semantics (Publication) In Progress
I've long thought that a stupid amount of modern discourse is wrapped up in arguing semantics instead of real substance. I have various hypotheses around why, inevitably, what to do about it, etc. It might be a good podcast.
Update: It is turning into a written publication first: Arguing Semantics: What Are We Even Talking About? The foundation essay is drafted, opening with the 2022–2024 inflation debate, where officials meant the rate of price increases was falling and most people heard that prices were. Draft essays on "inflation", "likely", "cheating", and the practice of tabooing a contested term are in the works.
2.3.5 Deep Thoughts Research Institute by Jack Handey (Bed and Breakfast)
I've always wanted to build a mini-retreat in the mountains of North Carolina with quiet, private casitas spread out around a common area. The idea would be to market towards thinkers, artists, etc. This would satisfy two desires I have: building things and chatting with interesting people.
2.3.6 Idea Space Visualizer (Website) In Progress
I have an idea in mind for a visualization to compare the "space of all ideas" to things that encompass subsets of that space. I would like to show subsets such as the human mind, cultures, humanity as a whole, LLMs, LLMs evolving through training, and probably more. It would boil down the highly-dimensional space of ideas to a 2D or 3D visualization.
Update: A first version exists, now called Concept Space. It's an interactive 3D exhibit with four guided perspectives: two minds meeting (shared ground, teaching, misunderstanding, and discovery), how a model learns, how two different models overlap, and how one person's reach compares to society's. Each scene can be viewed as a surface or a point cloud. It is a teaching metaphor, not a measurement of any real model or mind.
3. Past "Failures"
This is a list of projects and ideas that never got off the ground for one reason or another. The dates are approximate, and the reasons for failure varied from lack of execution to changing circumstances to simply moving on to other interests.
3.1 im-here.net (circa 1998)
Website for people and businessesto make their own presence, never went anywhere. I was 18 and the internet was even younger. (5 years before MySpace)
3.2 ToolbarMS (circa 2003)
MySpace Toolbar for Firefox - almost had it ready for viral explosion, ad based business model, then MySpace changed something and it wouldn't work. Had roughly 5,000 users at its peak.
3.3 Socord (2004)
Social record - combine everybody's media from an event into something... Never really pursued fully. Way ahead of it's time.
3.4 anononote.com (2008)
Anonymous note service on the web, never pushed it beyond the initial concept. The idea was that you could leave notes in the physical world with an ID that could be looked up on anononote.com to have an anonymous conversation with the person who left the note.
3.5 Boogie (circa 2009)
Booger swiping iPhone game, made a prototype but never took it further.
3.6 Kept (circa 2010)
iPhone image sharing app/game, got on TechCrunch sorta but didn't capitalize on the attention. The idea was that people could "own" images and trade them around. Think NFTs but way ahead of it's time.
3.7 swededfilms.com (2010)
Website cataloguing all the Sweded Films out there (a la Be Kind, Rewind). Built it but never promoted it properly. First thing (maybe the only thing) I ever got listed on Wikipedia.
3.8 GoPro Rental Service (circa 2011)
Did some market research, decided to pass on the opportunity.
3.9 Leather iPad Cases (circa 2012)
Made a few samples, briefly looked into scaling up but didn't pursue manufacturing.
3.10 XPerspective (circa 2013)
I travelled around in a van I converted filming action sports to see if I could make a living doing that. I didn't. It was fun and I had a YouTube Channel that mysteriously disappeared. There were lots of cool videos on there...
3.11 Third Circle (2012-2014)
A social network for partiers. "Facebook after dark" if you will.Actually made a very extensive prototype, closest to a real startup. Despite significant development, couldn't find the right market fit or funding.
3.12 Red Tree Reader (circa 2014)
Google Reader clone, had a few folks using it and got a couple donations, but couldn't compete with the emerging alternatives.
3.13 Starshine Labs/Aurora Wall (2016)
The idea was to make smart LED holds for climbing walls that could be used for training and games.Kinda sorta got started, learned embedded programming/hardware but never completed the vision.
3.14 theshirtstories.com (2017)
Sold a couple shirts, still exists but never scaled beyond hobby level.
3.15 cryptocurrencyguidebook.com (2018)
Idea was to cash in on the crypto momentum, but never did more than set up the basic site. 22 million other people had the same idea.
3.16 Odenli (2006, 2010, 2016) - Blue Sky Interfaces, LLC
My white whale. This ship has likely sailed though. (The name lives on in a new, unrelated venture; see 2.1.3.) [1] Was my plan to create a AI-like digital assistant using crowd-sourced brute-force. Years before Siri and Alexa and all the rest. Created several prototypes, but life events always got in the way.
3.17 Mem2 (2020s)
A powerful note-taking/second brain platform based off of a deeply customized TiddlyWiki implementation I personally used. Built a nearly complete system, but gave up on this dream after mem.ai was announced and did basically what I had envisioned, but with OpenAI backing. (mem.ai never really went anywhere, so maybe for the best.)
4. Documented Adventures
A couple of life adventures that I've documented, or that were documented.
4.1 Vicarbus (Our Travels in our Schoolie)
I spent all of 2017 converting a mid-sized school bus into a mobile home. In 2018 we hit the road and lived in it all over the states for a few years. It was awesome. We loved it. It broke down all of the time.
4.2 Yandziwood Park (Our Wedding)
We had an over-the-top dinosaur-themed wedding in a park in the mountains of North Georgia. It was a blast. Keanu Reeves made an appearance.
4.3 Octane Academy (Reality TV Show)
In 2012 I made a ridiculous submission video for a reality TV show called Octane Academy. I got in and proceeded to fail terribly, but it was a really neat experience.
4.4 Nick in a Van (Living on a Van)
In 2011 I bought a 1990 Ford Econoline 350 and converted it into a rudimentary living place. (Interestingly, the van happened to be Jerry Glanville's racing teams' van). I traveled around in it for quite some time trying my hand at video production and photography. Eventually I ran out of money and stopped.
4.5 Down With Sailboats (Living on a Sailboat)
During my final summer break of grad school I joined my friend with the ridiculous idea of sailing a 33 foot sailboat he just purchased near Cape Canaveral back to where he was residing in California via the Panama Canal. Neither of us had any sailing experience so it seemed like a good idea. We never made it past the Bahamas, but man what an experience.
5. Life Phases
Life tends to happen in chunks, these are my chunks.
CHILDHOOD
- Discovered passion for computing
- Discovered passion for "action sports"
COLLEGE
- Honed passion for computing
- Discovered passion for world travel
- Wrote paper that would lead to Odenli [1] (Open, Distributed, Natural Language Interface)
- Had lots of ideas
CORPORATE
- Discovered disdain for complacency
- Gained lots of weight, generally unhealthy
- Honed passion for world travel
- Discovered passion for "living, not existing", see discovered disdain for complacency
- Had lots of ideas
- Prototyped Odenli [1]
VAN LIFE
- Ended first startup
- Tried doing something bigger
- Discovered how tough it is to run a General Software Consultancy
- Honed passion for knowledge
- Met Heather and moved to Denver
- Started serious work on Odenli [1]
TRAVELER
- Started and stopped skydiving and tunnel flying
- Discovered Complexity Theory (of the Complex Systems variety)
- Built and lived in a school bus [4]
- Travelled the states and the world (continuously)
- Worked freelance (under Overstone Consulting, LLC moniker)
- Headed up software for a drone startup (Blueflite) [5]
- Stopped working on Odenli [1]
TRAVELER 2.0: THE BAD HEALTH EDITION
- Continued continuous travel, states and countries
- Traded in Vicaribus for Airstream (named Goldie)
- Developed unknown and occasionally debilitating health issues
- Spent a fortune on said health issues, to no avail (diagnostically speaking)
- Learned to live with said health issues and carry on
- Worked freelance (under SECUNDUS, LLC moniker)
- "AI" happened, constant making of things
6. Professional Background
What follows is the more traditional, resume-like presentation of my educational and professional experience.
I build production AI systems and the infrastructure behind them. Over more than two decades in software engineering, I have worked from intelligent search and startup product development through autonomous-aircraft operations software to grounded LLM systems and multi-agent orchestration. I work end to end: architecture, retrieval and context design, durable execution, safety controls, evaluation, and delivery.
6.1 Education
Master of Science in Computer Science (May 2005)
Specializing in Intelligent Systems, specifically Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, NLP.
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science (May 2003)
Specializing in Software Engineering, Graphics & Visualizations and Intelligent Systems.
6.2 Professional Experience
I design and build production AI systems, agent infrastructure, grounded LLM pipelines, and developer tooling for independent R&D and client engagements.
My work spans streaming AI applications, structured extraction, document and vision workflows, hybrid retrieval with citations, durable human-in-the-loop controls, and multi-provider model integration.
Delivered remote software engineering and consulting engagements across industries and technical domains.
I took products and systems from problem definition through architecture, implementation, and production delivery.
Led software engineering for autonomous-aircraft operations, including flight systems, ground control, and customer-facing operations software.
As lead test pilot, I flew the aircraft supported by the systems I built, using flight and sensor data to close the loop between real-world behavior, simulation, and engineering decisions. I also developed MATLAB models to validate vehicle and flight-system performance.
Co-founded a software consulting firm and product lab, leading engineering across client engagements and internal products.
I partnered with startups and established businesses to translate needs into technical solutions and take products from concept to production. During my time, the company generated approximately $4 million in total revenue before my exit.
Designed and built Third Circle, a social platform, and led its engineering, product development, fundraising, and launch work from early concept through release.
Personal consulting firm.
After leaving the desk job to travel fulltime for a while, I continued as a freelance engineer to keep gas in the tank and food in my belly.
A leader in online healthcare content and benefits management.
First job out of grad school. Went from a junior engineer to project lead to "Innovator" - a position gifted to me to focus on rapid prototyping of new product ideas. This is the only place I was ever able to apply my Machine Learning and Information Retrieval skillset from school to create an in-house indexing and search solution.
Premiere weather tv station and owner of weather.com.
I worked here as an intern on two occasions while an undergrad.
7. Conclusion
Not yet. (hopefully)
8. Addendums
8.1 Addendum: Hobbies
- computing
- embedded electronics
- woodworking
- reality tv
- reading
- photography
- movie extra
- writing
- video production
- improv
- music production
- podcasting
- drums
- bass guitar
- video gaming
- poker
- ping-ping
- golf
- aggressive inline skating
- skiing
- mountain biking
- paintball
- snowboarding
- bmx biking
- horseback riding
- krav maga
- juijitsu
- wrestling
- sailing
- fishing
- kneeboarding
- surfing
- swimming
- scuba
- kite surfing
- wakeboarding
- karting
- autocross
- fpv drones
- skydiving
- indoor skydiving
- baseball
- football
- hiking
- walking
- plants
- van lifer
- bus lifer
- travel
- rver
- shooting
8.2 Addendum: Favorite Quotes
"The box contains us. The box contains everything. And inside the box, there's another box. Ad infinitum, Ad nauseam. Uhoh."
- Stewart, Devs Miniseries“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”
- Edward O. Wilson“Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.”
– Alan Watts"For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
- Shakespeare“Respect yourself enough to walk away from anything that no longer serves you, grows you, or makes you happy.”
- Robert Tew“When you judge others, you do not define them; you define yourself.”
- Earl Nightingale"If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain."
- Maya Angelou“Culture is not your friend, it’s an impediment to understanding what’s going on. That’s why the words cult and culture have a direct relationship to each other. Culture is an extremely repressive cult that leads to all kinds of humiliation and degradation, and automatic, unquestioned and unthinking behavior.”
- Terence McKenna"To understand is to perceive patterns"
- Isaiah Berlin"That's what I love about Wyatt. He can talk himself into anything."
- Doc Holliday's character in Tombstone"The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living."
- Henri Poincare"We're all so good at recognizing what's shitty about something and how we fix it and we're all so bad at making something, so just make something bad and then criticize it until it's good."
- Dan Harmon"If you want to be happy, let go of your wants. If you want to be effective, harness them."
- Maya (i think) from A Beautifully Foolish EndeavorHeraclitus, a Greek philosopher born in 544 B.C. said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”
“If you know the way broadly you will see it in everything.”
- Miyamoto Musashi
8.3 Addendum: Favorite Movies
- Point Break
- Starship Troopers
- Fifth Element
- Tremors
- Tombstone
- Jurassic Park
- Grandma's Boy
- Dazed and Confused
- Half Baked
- Swiss Army Man
- Super Troopers
- Johnny Mnemonic
8.4 Addendum: Favorite Soundtracks
- The Crow
- Natural Born Killers
- Romeo + Juliet
- Fifth Element
- Kill Bill
- Judgement Night
- Starship Troopers
- So I Married an Axe Murderer
- The Beach
- Hackers
- Westworld
- Jurassic Park
- Pulp Fiction
- Trainspotting
- Top Gun