Nathan
Simmons
builds software
worth caring about.

I didn't find software engineering the way most engineers do. I came to it sideways, and then one afternoon I completed a basic HTML tutorial that made a popup window appear in a browser. It was barely anything, but it was mine, and the feeling was immediate:this is it.

It makes sense in retrospect. I've always been someone who builds things with my hands, obsesses over design, and makes music. Software is the only field I've found that runs both channels at once: the analytical and the creative. Most careers make you pick a lane. This one doesn't.

Eight years in now, more than half as a technical lead and manager, and the hands-on side never went away. I still write code. I still obsess over UX. Over the last couple of years I went from skeptic to full convert on agentic AI tools, then went further and built a practice around them with my team, figured out what they look like at enterprise scale, and made the whole engineering organization better at using them.

Same impulse as that browser popup. Still chasing it.