About

I'm Nat Bennett, and this is my newsletter.

I have a complicated relationship with place, because I grew up as a Coast Guard brat, and then spent my first few years of adulthood chasing jobs, but the Bay Area is the closest thing I have to "home." I am especially fond of Oakland but right now I live in Berkeley.

I am... a technologist? I aspire to Patrick McKenzie's "I solve business problems, occasionally a computer is involved." For me a computer is usually involved, and that computer is probably running either automated tests or applications in containers. I like the Rube Goldbergian nature of infrastructure and release problems.

I write code. Right now I am digging Elixir, but I also love Ruby and grudgingly respect Java and Golang. I would love Bash if I could ever remember how to write an if statement in it.

Simpler Machines is my "core" newsletter, and my platform for figuring out what I like to write about that other people want to read. The only rule is that it goes out once week, on Friday mornings. You should subscribe.

I also write Photo Newsletter, a weekly newsletter with a few photographs. This is more of a hobby/personal passion project but if you subscribe it will make your inbox prettier.

It's been mostly about making software, about software infrastructure, and about consequences of radical collaboration.