Networks. Custom software. Automation. Small hardware. Physical installs. And the network and security work, the paperwork, and the teaching you need after hand-off.
First step: a short technical call to see if it is a fit. Bring whatever notes, photos, diagrams or limits you already have. You get a reality check on the size of the job and a tested build plan or a working first piece. Not a sales pitch.
Not a list of technologies I have read about. All of this runs for real, on servers I built and still take care of. That is why I can tell you when technology is truly the answer, and when it is an expensive way to avoid the real problem.
Software I built
Hospitals, banks, and anyone holding private data have to prove they’re secure, often to several rulebooks at once. Most teams do it in spreadsheets.
I built one place for it. Write down how you protect something once, and it counts toward 30 rulebooks: HIPAA, SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIST, PCI, and more. Vendor security reviews, risks, tests, and proof all live in the same place.
The demo opens your own private copy of a made-up health system. Click around. It goes away after 24 hours.
The hands-on side — diagnosing and rebuilding real physical systems, from the wiring in the wall to the app that runs on top of it.
Replacing a failed intercom in a historic limestone apartment building, plus one web app with three sides: the public site, residents, and staff. The door work is paused by the client’s budget until 2027; the website build continues. Read the case study.
Designing small-business and residential networks and then installing them — cabling, terminations, right-sized IP plans, and mapping undocumented systems with a meter instead of a guess.
The systems everything else runs on — designed, deployed and operated end to end.
Managed virtual private servers joined to a private mesh network, with automated provisioning, identity integration, monitoring, backup and a documented exit path. Customers get their own environment without operating it themselves. Read the case study.
A control plane that takes a new node from bare host to a fully configured, TLS-terminated, SSO-integrated application stack without manual steps — including per-job tokens, health verification and rollback.
Centralized authentication across every hosted application using Authentik, with OIDC clients, federated login and per-service access policy.
Break-in detection and weak-spot scanning that I run myself on every server: a central log system, host monitoring, a guard at the edge that blocks attackers, and scheduled scans.
Write a security control once and it counts toward 30 frameworks: NIST 800-53, HIPAA, SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, CMMC, GDPR and more. Vendor security reviews, a risk register, tests and evidence in one place. The live demo opens your own private copy of a made-up health system.
Off-grid communication devices and apps, built under the Blackout Labs name.
The off-grid side of what I build: radios, solar nodes, repeaters, portable kits and the apps that run on them. They keep people talking with no infrastructure, no subscription and no cell coverage. The Swiss Army Node is the flagship.
A Blackout Labs device. One solar-powered box that keeps people talking when the internet and cell towers are down. One long-range radio speaks Reticulum, Meshtastic or MeshCore, a small computer runs the network on its own, and handhelds carry it in your pocket.
Applied AI systems, built and run on owned hardware rather than rented APIs.
An agent platform and orchestration backend running against local models on owned GPUs, with a tool-calling runtime, job scheduling and a web interface.
Retrieval-augmented knowledge infrastructure — a vector-backed document store and API used to ground AI systems in real organizational content instead of guesswork.
A queueing layer that shares a finite pool of GPUs across inference, image generation and training workloads without jobs trampling each other.
A real-time news monitoring platform. It collects articles and posts, streams them through Kafka and Apache Flink, and uses local AI models to tell genuine trending stories apart from coordinated or misleading content. The heavy processing runs overnight on systemd timers, and the results feed the content pipelines below.
An automated social-media pipeline. It picks a timely topic — often a current story from Falken — writes the caption in each brand’s own voice, generates the image on a local GPU, and posts to Mastodon and Bluesky on a natural, human-paced schedule. Several brand accounts stay active every day with nobody at the keyboard.
A daily world-news podcast made start to finish by an automated pipeline. Every morning it ranks the day’s stories from the 700+ news sites Falken follows, GDELT’s global news coverage and social media by how widely each one is spreading outside the US, writes the script with a local language model, voices it and publishes it — about ten minutes, no hands. A watchdog checks every run and alerts or repairs on a failure.
The video side of the same pipeline. Each episode automatically becomes a video — an animated on-screen host set in a retro TV frame, rendered through the GPU Scheduler — then uploads to a self-hosted PeerTube channel and gets promoted by the Meme Engine. One script in; a podcast, a video and social posts out.
Production applications built for real customers and real transactions.
A full e-commerce storefront on a headless commerce backend, with print-on-demand fulfillment integration, custom React front end and automated order sync.
In beta now, and taking on beta testers. Your own page on your own server, with the feel of old MySpace: your look, your song, your Top 8. It follows people on Mastodon, Bluesky and Nostr, translates posts on your own device, and plays video. It works with the networks people already use instead of replacing them.
Apply to be a beta tester
An artist platform with provenance tracking, verification, commissions and federation services running as independent microservices.
A local barter and marketplace where the unit of exchange is not always money. People list what they have and what they want, and the system matches trades within a real geographic area, favoring nearby exchange over shipping across the country.
A private daily mood tracker and mental-health check-in app. A companion asks how you are feeling, one tap answers it, and the record stays yours: no ads, no data sales. Built to be easy on neurodivergent brains, installable on a phone, with an Android build.
A free dating and community app for everyone. No paywalls, no paying to message, no ads, no selling your data. Kink-friendly, open-relationship friendly and easy on neurodivergent brains, with its own photo storage and real-time messaging.
Verifiable online voting for communities, secured by mathematics instead of trust: ElGamal encryption, blind signatures and zero-knowledge proofs, so every ballot is secret and every count can be checked. No voter ID, no corporate kill switch.
My own Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Matrix and Bluesky servers, run together with one login and one monitoring setup.
Communication for an audience that has no patience for jargon.
A published children’s picture book — a true story about a three-legged deer, written under the pen name Jeffrey Lebowski. Different audience, same discipline: take something real and make it land for the reader in front of you.
My next picture book, in production now, one page at a time. A crew of dogs, a hole full of golden acorns, and the kind of heroism that is only mildly heroic. Written under my own name this time.
Clients hire me to work out what is really wrong. This page is here so you know that when the answer turns out to be technical, I can build it, not just suggest it.
