every bird follows three local rules. no leader, no plan. switch one off:
Nathan Amick — Indianapolis, IN
Building software with AI and teaching engineers to do the same.
Twenty-five years of production engineering, now pointed at teaching: mentoring, coursework, and agentic systems that do real work.
What I'm doing now
Mentoring engineers into AI-native practice
One-to-one, end to end. Currently two very different students: a seasoned site reliability engineer who had never touched AI, now using it daily in production work — and an absolute beginner, now independently building full-stack web applications.
Running agentic systems that do real work
Multi-agent research and data-maintenance systems, including agents that keep officeholder information current for a live civic platform — thousands of state, congressional, and federal leaders. Sustained operation with real accuracy consequences, not demos.
Designing coursework
Instructional material in Python, built and tested for classrooms of working engineers and first-time programmers alike. Plus conference-style, multi-session curriculum for full-program events.
Refactoring Consciousness
A video series: philosophy of mind and consciousness science, structured for software engineers. A genuinely hard domain, taught with the tools engineers already trust.
youtube.com/@refactoringconsciousnessBefore that
- 2024 –Independent AI engineer & technical mentor
- 2023AI document tools, WCAG accessibility work that landed a State of California contract — Intoo
- 2020HIPAA-compliant genomics platform, 100GB per patient — LifeOmic
- 2018Coursework and learning software for new programmers — Home Code Makers
- 2016Peer-to-peer music platform on Electron and IPFS — All The Music
- 2013Supply-chain transparency used by Fortune 100 companies — GoodGuide
- 2007Co-founded a VPS hosting company, data centers on two continents — Seedbox
- 2001Customer portals for VOIP services, PHP on Linux — Future Phone
Writing
React Server Actions
React Server Actions allow you to run functions on the server directly from your React components. Think of them as a bridge between client-side interactions and server-side logic. Instead of setting up an API endpoint for every little server interaction, you can define actions that execute server-side with a simple function call from the client.
Jan 2024
Especially Concerning the Separation of Concerns
A look at the shift from a separation of concerns based on technology (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) to one based on UI objects (like buttons, navigation bars, cards).
May 2023
What is a Component?
The term "component" has become a cornerstone concept shaping how we design, develop, and think about software systems. But what exactly is a component, and how has it changed the way we build web apps?
Jan 2020