I had a good, decade-plus run in the media space. Near the tail end, I was running a team of 6 developers, and we were responsible for building and maintaining a large email and newsletter ecosystem. It was a substantial application, sending billions of emails a year, probably annoying a few folks with packed inboxes, but it was fun, and we had pretty high clickthrough rates so at least some of those folks were satisfied.
Even though newsletters weren't as affected by the AI boom as web and mobile, the industry by itself lost a lot of income from advertising and pageviews. Why open your wallets on the paywall when you can get your news faster and free through Gemini search or X? It's a new chapter for media, but 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 was sold. 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.
AI is getting big, but it's silly to me to just stuff it into things that don't need or want it, which is what a lot of companies are doing. I think the future is in building tools that help people do their jobs better, not replace them, and not because "ooh I'm scared of big bad robot taking my job." I'm one of the guys building those robots! I build them wherever I can, 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 them here.