Software for
things that actually
have to work.
Full-stack engineer, sixteen years deep in .NET and desktop apps — now building agentic systems where they belong: on the factory floor, in the workshop, on your own machine.
This week I'm tracking the AI access restrictions and policy shifts affecting my personal tools, while keeping phillipsben.com up to date. I'm also working on getting local inference running so I can keep my agents going when cloud models get throttled or pulled.
Ask about my work.
What's on the site.
§ 01 / GUIDEBiography →
The twenty-year version. Industries, roles, tools, and a short version for the recruiter in a hurry.
Projects →
Completed and active work. Each entry has a write-up, the constraints, and what I learned.
Now →
What I'm focused on this month. Updated as it changes. A snapshot, not a feed.
Hobbies →
3D printers I've modded, smart-home tinkering, a local-AI homelab, and family.
Uses →
Hardware, software, models, filaments. The boring details that take years to settle on.
Contact →
Email, calendar, résumé. The fastest way to reach me. No forms with twelve fields.
Recent work.
All projects →
Talk to Virtual Me
A bounded career assistant on this site that answers questions about my work — grounded only in what's published here, with hard refusal and redaction bounds, and a backend it can't talk its way around.
Workstation Toolbar
A workstation appbar deployed to ~100 machines plant-wide — inherited from another developer's prototype and rebuilt into a four-tier system in about three weeks.
Cervi
An in-house LLM assistant that guides employees through filing service tickets correctly — running on a CPU-only commodity VM, no GPU, because that's the hardware that was already in the building.
I'm less interested in which framework than in how the pieces integrate — and what that means for the people who keep the line, and the business, moving.