ABOUT NEWT
I was drowning under an impossible workload and tired of feeling like I was the problem. I could not make myself remember everything, but I could give myself a support system so that when I inevitably forgot, something was there to catch the piece I dropped.
I have ADHD and autism, along with depression, anxiety, and sleep issues. My brain drops pieces. I lose track of time, birthdays, things I agreed to do, the last time I took medication, when I need a refill, what is actually urgent, and sometimes the thread of a task itself.
For a while, some of the answer was other people. I asked friends and family to remind me. My wife gave me a short list of chores every day. It helped, but it also quietly made someone else responsible for keeping me on track. Everyone is busy. Everyone needs help. When you need that help consistently, it can start to feel like you are making your problems someone else's job.
So I built myself a digital brain: a system that can remember dates, surface the next thing, hold context, and give me a little reward for doing the boring stuff. It does not make my brain different. It gives my brain somewhere to put the pieces.
Too many steps, scattered records, repeated information, paper piles, and workflows that depend on somebody remembering what happens where and why are hostile by accumulation. I want one understandable system built around the work that actually happens.
Off-the-shelf software has to work broadly. People do not. Two people with the same diagnosis—or no diagnosis at all—can need completely different support. I like making the tool fit the person instead of asking the person to contort themselves around the tool.
Relief looks like doing chores regularly, refilling a prescription before it runs out, clearing a work queue instead of watching it grow, getting home earlier, or realizing you no longer have to keep twelve moving parts in your head.
WEIRDLY SPECIFIC IS WELCOME
I do not think every difficulty needs to be automated away. If being good at something matters to me, I want to learn the skill. If I just need to get through it so I can spend my energy on the thing I actually care about, I reach for help.
That is why I especially enjoy work for families, people with brain injuries or other cognitive support needs, and small nonprofits. Their problems are often real, consequential, and far too specific for a giant software company to care about. The specificity is the fun part.
A SIDEWAYS ROUTE HERE
My background is in education, communication and media production, law, nonprofit administration, and wildlife care. Those fields taught me that comfort with technology has very little to do with age, profession, or how “smart” somebody is on paper. What feels obvious to one person can be completely opaque to another.
I design workflows, rules, information architecture, interfaces, and tests, then use AI-assisted development to turn those decisions into working software. I care much more about whether the machine makes the work easier than whether the implementation looks impressive.