About
The longer version.
For the last five years my job has been to make sure something happens live every week, on time, with volunteers and a small budget, and to build whatever systems that takes.
How I got here
I came up in music and technology at the same time, which meant I was the person who could play the set and fix the console. That turned into a career in small organizations, where whoever plans the thing also buys the equipment, writes the documentation, trains the volunteers, and stands on the stage when it starts.
Over the last two years the technology half started pulling harder. I got tired of repeating the same manual work, so I started building instead. Then a client asked whether I could do the same for their 1,500-recording backlog. I could, and I'd rather do that than almost anything else.
Why I'm looking
- Problems that keep changing. I'm wary of a role I could automate into boredom in six months.
- Work connected to its result. I want to see what my work produces, and its value to be clear.
- Somewhere that's building. I'm at my best on a hard problem with a real constraint.
How I build
I build with AI tooling and I'm open about it. I can scope a system, design it, read and debug the code, deploy it, and keep it running. I'm not a software engineer and wouldn't want to be hired as one.
Most organizations aren't short of engineers. They're short of people who understand a process well enough to fix it and can also build the fix. That's where I work.
I also spend real time deciding what shouldn't be automated. Some work stays manual because a person's judgment is the product.
Working with me
- Long stretches of focus, then real collaboration. The meeting-heavy version of a job isn't where I add value.
- I'll say when something isn't sustainable. With the data, before it breaks, even when the problem is my own workload.
- Small teams suit me. I've never worked somewhere the org chart could absorb a problem for me.
The rest of what I do, including music and sermons, is at projects.nolensmith.com.