Now
What has my attention at the moment.
A now page: less a résumé, more an honest status update, rewritten whenever it stops being true. Last refreshed .
Work
Making AI adoption boring on purpose
Most of my client work right now is helping teams get past the demo phase into evaluation harnesses, review practices, security posture, and an honest accounting of what changes about the job. The exciting part of AI is largely over and the useful part is starting, which is a better place to be doing this work.
Fractional CTO seats
A handful of companies where I am the senior technical voice in the room a few days a month. Small enough that the work is real, few enough that the attention is real, and structured so the decisions outlive my involvement.
Modernization without the rewrite
Reading old codebases and finding the smallest set of changes that buys the next three years. It is the most fun I have all week and I will not be taking questions.
Community
Mentorship Saturdays, still running
Twelve years in and the invitation stands. If you are trying to get into tech and cannot find a door, this is one, and I would rather hear from you early than after you have spent six months on the wrong thing.
AI literacy sessions
Practical sessions for owners, execs, and teams who keep getting sold the future and would rather understand the present. Most of the value is in naming what the technology cannot do, which nobody selling it has much incentive to cover.
Off the clock
Basketball, mostly as a spectator now
A decade of coaching youth teams left me permanently unable to watch a game without narrating spacing. The Blazers keep me humble, reliably and on schedule.
Portland things
Rain, coffee, and a tech community that punches above the city's weight. I have lived a lot of my career here deliberately, and the way this city builds things has rubbed off on how I do.
Reading
Mostly nonfiction about organizations and how they decide things, which turns out to be the same subject as software architecture with different nouns and worse diagrams.
If any of this overlaps with what you are doing, I am easy to reach and I answer my own mail. Email me at dan@helloworlddevs.com.