A few weeks back I sat down with Sachin Kamdar and Doyle Irvin for an episode of Building for Others. We’ve known each other a long time, since we used to work together after WordPress VIP acquired Parse.ly, and the conversation reflected that — it bounced from serious work to slightly ridiculous side projects and back again. I think I smiled the entire hour.
Sachin is now the founder and CEO of elvex, the AI adoption platform that puts the podcast on, and Doyle is the one who consistently asks the question that makes you stop and actually think. The episode is called “From Little Leagues to World-Class Think Tanks,” which is a pretty fair description of the range we covered.
We started on the think-tank end. As a Forward Deployed Engineer at Automattic, a lot of what I do these days is helping our WordPress VIP customers figure out where AI actually belongs in their stack. We dug into the work I’ve been doing with Pew Research, where we built an agentic workflow on top of GitHub issues. The whole thing rests on a single idea: a really good issue template — one with crisp acceptance criteria — is a really good prompt. When a researcher or producer files an issue that meets the criteria, an agent picks it up, opens a pull request (with tests), and a developer steps in for the last twenty percent. We set the bar at eighty. We’re consistently hitting closer to ninety-nine. The thing I like most about that project isn’t the speed — it’s that it pulls non-engineers into the tech stack. Researchers can describe the chart they want for a study, and the agent can build it while everyone’s asleep.
The other half of the conversation was the little-league end: the side projects you build because they’re worth building, not because there’s a deck behind them. I talked about a hyper-local weather app I made for our Little League fields (a quarter inch of rain and we close the diamonds), a draft tool that proudly took down its own database on draft night (turns out the free tier of any API really means it), and two apps I’m still actively shipping.
The first is Today, my RSS reader, available for Mac and iOS. I missed Google Reader. I missed pulling up a list of feeds, deciding what mattered to me, and reading without an algorithm guessing on my behalf. So I built an app that grabs my feeds, runs them through Apple Intelligence on-device, and writes a single daily digest in the spirit of Dave Pell’s NextDraft. No infinite scroll. No ads. No notifications. Just — here’s what happened, get on with your day.
The second is Walkup DJ, the only paid app I’ve ever shipped. It lets you give every kid on a Little League roster a proper baseball intro — walkup music plus an AI announcer voice. I cannot legally call any of those voices by name, but the “Los Angeles” one has a certain Vin Scully energy, and “Milwaukee” sounds suspiciously like Bob Uecker.
Sachin made a point on the show that’s been rattling around in my head ever since: AI lets you feel the itch you wouldn’t have let yourself feel before. If you didn’t think a solution was possible, your brain quietly filed the annoyance under “the way things are.” Now that the friction is gone, you start scratching. That’s been my experience exactly. It’s a slot machine, and it pays out often enough to keep me coming back.
Big thanks to Sachin and Doyle for having me on, and for making it as fun as it was.
Listen here: From Little Leagues to World-Class Think Tanks.
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