I build small, self-hosted tools, mostly around AI, privacy, and hardware I own. I write about what I learn at sampatt.com.

Before that: technology policy in DC, then co-founding OpenBazaar, a decentralized marketplace backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures. I wrote one of the first books about Bitcoin, spent a stint as an Apart Labs Fellow doing AI safety research, and now work as a Technical Operations Specialist at MessageWrap.

Three lanes behind one button: a deterministic parser that answers in 0.26s, a small model for what's already in the weights, and a full agent for everything else. Streaming mu-law audio over Bluetooth, durable jobs that survive the watch app closing, and a portrait drawn from an 8-colour palette.

Watch the video · Read the write-up

• Patterkin — a private family video platform. I digitized 122 Video8 tapes of childhood footage and built an HLS streaming site with per-person timelines, reactions, and comments, on Cloudflare R2 and Supabase. Write-up
• GG-GeoJSON — a geography meta dataset and browser editor.
• FourNiner — GeoGuessr training tool that pipes Street View locations into an Obsidian vault as flashcards.
• Shell-Recall — search and visualize your shell history as a timeline.
• StrapTo — stream the output of self-hosted LLMs to browsers over WebRTC.
• LookMa — React Native app connecting Android devices to locally-run LLM servers.
• LlamaTrivia — I wired a trivia game to an LLM to see if it could beat my score. It did. (video)

• o3 Beats a Master-Level GeoGuessr Player — Even with Fake EXIF Data — #1 on Hacker News
• My Grandma Was a Fed: Lessons from Digitizing Hundreds of Hours of Childhood — HN front page
• Visualizing Why Bitcoin Can't Work Over HF Radio — interactive visualizations
• Artificial Advocates: Biasing Democratic Feedback Using AI — 3rd place, Apart hackathon; led to the fellowship

Python and JavaScript day to day — React, Node, Flask, Django, Postgres, Linux, Git. WebRTC shows up in a lot of my projects. I use the Anthropic, OpenAI, and Groq APIs, and run local models with Ollama when the data shouldn't leave the house.

sampatt.com · LinkedIn · git@sampatt.com

Interested in collaborating on amateur radio, AI, and decentralization projects. I participated in the first HF radio transaction using Bitcoin, and outside of work you'll find me playing GeoGuessr, lifting, or table tennis.