About

Hi — I’m Tyler. I’m a Data Solutions Architect in the DC area, about to join X-energy as an AI Software Engineer. They build small modular nuclear reactors — pebble-bed, high-temperature, gas-cooled — and manufacture the TRISO fuel that goes in them.

Most of my work is the unglamorous middle: getting data from where it is to where it’s useful, and working out which problems actually need a model and which ones need a better query. That second category is bigger than people expect.

Which is mostly what I write about here. There’s a lot of noise in this field and a fair amount of it is expensive. If a post has a thesis, it’s usually you probably don’t need the fancy thing yet — not because the fancy thing is bad, but because the boring thing underneath it is load-bearing and nobody has checked it lately.

This site runs on a five-node Raspberry Pi cluster in my house — Docker Swarm, Traefik out front, the whole thing built and broken and rebuilt by hand. It is comprehensively overkill for a blog with two posts on it. That’s rather the point: it’s where I break things on hardware I own instead of hardware that matters.