Hi, I'm Jay

I've been living inside computers since I was five — Paint and Pinball first, then PC gaming, modding, running game servers, building machines from parts, and reinstalling Linux more times than I can count. By the time I wrote a line of code I was already comfortable with filesystems, config files, and the command line. I just didn't know yet that being unafraid of the machine was most of the battle.

The click came from AutoHotkey. I wanted one hotkey that opened the five websites I checked every morning. It worked — and then I realized the list could just as easily be a hundred. That's the whole idea of a program: write the instructions once, and the machine runs them instantly, perfectly, every time.

Everything since has been self-taught and problem-first. I learn by building something I want to exist, getting it working end to end, and writing down what I figured out along the way. These days that means full-stack TypeScript, a database, an LLM somewhere in the loop, and a deployed URL at the end of it — the whole setup is in my stack.

I work with AI agents daily and I'm opinionated about how. They're very good at execution and still need someone holding the architecture. I write down decisions as I make them — why a format was chosen, why an approach failed — which is partly how I learn and partly so the reasoning survives past the moment.