I spent over a decade in media tech, most of it building and scaling a large email and newsletter platform — billions of emails a year, a team of 6 developers, and pretty high clickthrough rates so at least some of those folks with packed inboxes were satisfied.
These days I'm an AI engineer in the federal government, and on the side I co-founded rAI Optics, build open source tools, and make live coding music. It's been a good shift — I've always been more interested in seeing if I can code things that exist in the real world, not just on screens.
I didn't care much for AI at first, since it was just "paste into ChatGPT" and hype at the beginning, but I got sold when I popped open Claude and asked "Ok, how do I wire and code this ESP32 to run my sprinkler system?" and it gave me a full wiring diagram, code, and instructions. I started building stuff with it, and now I'm building more stuff with it. Claude Code comes out, Codex, etc. and building is fun again, since I can get an idea and a starting point without smarmy StackOverflow or Reddit posters going "hurr durr I'm an expert come back in 10 years" without offering any help.
I like building tools that help people do their jobs better. I'm one of the guys building the robots, and even though I've been trying to automate my own job for years, they still give me more stuff to do.
So, welcome to NaderLabs. I'm going to build stuff, and document it here.