Hi, I’m Jason. I bought a property in Graham, Washington a few years back, and turning it into the place I actually wanted to live was always going to need more than weekends: raised bed gardens, chicken coop and run, wildlife and Koi pond, a maker shop, and the long tail of small projects that come with owning land. At some point it made sense to step back from full-time product work and actually do it, so I did, for almost three years.
The timing turned out to be lucky. Around the same time the property work got serious, the ground was visibly shifting under product work itself. Agents, MCP, local models, the gap between “I have an idea” and “it runs” closing fast. I wanted to get my hands properly into it. For a while I had time for both, and I used it.
I’m back in product now, at GitLab, working on engineering intelligence and insights. The building has not stopped, it just moved back to nights and weekends where it started.
This blog is the log. The homestead side shows up as builds and projects: chicken coops, ponds, garden infrastructure, woodshop work. The AI side shows up as homelab projects, multi-agent systems, local model experiments, MCP servers, and the occasional reflection on product work, from Tableau and Elastic and now GitLab.
The two halves are not as separate as they sound. The garden has a multi-agent assistant. The security cameras feed a pipeline into TimescaleDB. The chicken coop is well instrumented. The line between “homestead” and “AI lab” is mostly imaginary at this point.
Photography, music, and the occasional ATV ride round out the mix.
Opinions here are my own, not my employer’s.
