An about page,
built in front
of you.
I’m Nolan Northup. I build things with Claude. Most about pages would tell you that in a stat grid. This one is going to show you, by being itself a piece of the work.
Scroll. The page builds itself as you go. The prompts are real, edited for length. The output is the page you’re reading.
The first prompt
Twenty years of enterprise architecture taught me what models of work survive and what models break. The last two have taught me what changes when the model can also write the code.
We rejected six other openings. The one above works because it’s specific — twenty years, not “decades”; “the model” instead of “AI” — and because it doesn’t ask you to feel anything yet.
Choosing a palette, in public
The site already runs on four palettes — one per season. The about page lives inside that system, not next to it. Four palettes; the active one is whichever the rest of the site is wearing today:
The biography, drafted live
I grew up in Wisconsin and never quite left. Studied telecommunications and network management at UW-Stout in 2003, which was, at the time, considered a sensible degree. The two decades since were spent inside enterprise IT — Fortune 500, government, higher ed — shipping the unsexy software that runs the world's payroll and procurement and student records. The transition to AI work was not a pivot; it was a continuation. The same diligence that moves an ERP from on-prem to AWS turns out to move a small idea into a working app over a weekend, with a model in the loop. The handoffs are different. The skill is the same. Day job is AI Development Engineer at Sierra-Cedar — the same loop, scaled to people's actual paychecks.
A wrong turn we deleted
A page that shows itself being made should be honest about what didn't work. Here's a section we wrote, looked at for a full minute, and threw away.
The works, as a register
What I’m at, currently
A “now” block. Less weekly bulletin, more current focus — I rewrite it when the work shifts, not when the calendar does.
Closing the document
Every Almanac issue ends with a colophon — a short note about how the thing was made. This page deserves one too.
If you’d like to build something this way — out loud, with the prompts visible — I take one engagement at a time.