Backend Engineer Building Reliable Systems
I'm Nate — a backend engineer or really, a technologist. A term I learned from a great programmer called Radley Lewis (who made this rssg!) — focused on distributed systems, automation, and the beauty of networks.
After transitioning from aviation at 35, I discovered that programming is about understanding how systems behave under real conditions. I build backend services, CLI tools, and distributed systems — software that stays reliable when things go wrong.
I grew up on IRC and Usenet — environments where systems were distributed, unreliable, and required resilience. That background shaped how I think about networking, concurrency, and failure handling.
Today I focus on backend systems, automation, and developer tooling — code that's observable, maintainable, and designed to survive reality.
Selected Client Work
🔧 Ruby on Rails Web Application Ruby on Rails · MySQL · JavaScript · REST APIs Full-stack web application built for a private client: user authentication, CRUD flows, relational database design from schema to deployment, and RESTful API integration. Built with Rails conventions and a deliberate eye on what the client actually needed — not what was technically interesting.
⚙️ Go Service — Jellyfin & NAS Integration Go · Jellyfin API · Concurrent I/O · Systems Integration A Go binary that concurrently scans a client's Synology NAS for new video files, calls the Jellyfin API to generate iframe embed links, and delivers structured data to the Rails app. Go chosen deliberately — lightweight goroutines to handle large directory trees within tight memory constraints. Three systems connected, each doing what it does best.
🗄️ MySQL Schema Design MySQL · Relational Design · Normalization · Indexing Database design for multiple clients — normalization, indexing, and data modelling built from direct client requirements and prepared for production load.
Selected Projects
💬 P2P Chat System Distributed chat with UDP discovery, TCP connections, and full-mesh networking. My greatest passion — and my most opinionated code.
🎮 Warcraft Logs CLI GraphQL API client with OAuth2 and structured interrupt analysis. Discovered an undocumented API field through curl exploration. A work in progress.
📖 Ruby CLI Journal Built in my favorite language, 1970s-style: code, books, and a ruler for debug. This one made me a programmer.
🌤️ Weather Intelligence System Go + Python talking through JSON. My first time making two languages cooperate.
💼 Stock Trading Simulator Flask + PostgreSQL, deployed to production. School project Everyone's gotta CRUD!
What I Value
- Reliability with humor
- Automation over repetition
- Observability over assumptions
- Systems that degrade gracefully
- Code that other developers trust
"I learn by building, shipping, and improving — systems that work in production, not just in theory."