We just published something I am genuinely proud of.

Four months of Git logs. Live on the Blacksky Labs site. Every commit. Every push. Every late night fix and early morning feature. From late December 2025 to right now.

Not a highlight reel. Not a curated timeline of wins. The actual record of what it looks like to build something real from scratch with no funding, no team, and no safety net.

It gets messy in there. There are commits at 2am. There are fixes for things that should never have broken. There are days where the log shows three small pushes because that was all there was left in the tank. And there are days where something clicks and you can see it in the volume and the velocity.

That's what building actually looks like.

We say build in public and we mean it. Not just the LinkedIn posts about building. Not just the product launches and the milestone announcements. The commits. The diffs. The timestamps that tell you exactly when someone was up working on something they believed in.

Four months. Eleven products shipped. An academic paper published. A provisional patent filed. A Google Cloud partnership. A civic platform. An AI image studio. A sales agent. A swarm robotics platform. An NLP API. A free apprenticeship program. A live changelog.

All of it documented. All of it real.

Wayne Gretzky said you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. I would add — you also miss 100% of the shots you don't show up to take. Day after day. Commit after commit. Whether anyone is watching or not.

We showed up. The log proves it.

Come see what four months of belief looks like.

blackskymedia.org

#NewToolsNewRealities #BlackskyLabs #BuildInPublic #BlackFounders #AI #Ubuntu

I want to tell you something I don't talk about enough.

This started in an 8th grade computer lab. A kid who taught himself to read with comic books sitting down in front of an Apple IIe and deciding that whatever this thing was, he was going to figure it out. No teacher told him to. No parent pushed him toward it. Just curiosity and stubbornness and the feeling that this machine was a door and he was going to find out where it led.

That kid is me. And that door has never stopped opening.

I spent the 90s on the road as a touring musician. Playing shows, chasing sound, living in the space between cities. People ask me if I regret not staying in tech during the dot com boom. I don't. The music taught me things that no computer lab ever could. Timing. Feel. The difference between technically correct and actually right. The way a room responds to something real versus something performed. I carried all of that back into every line of code I ever wrote afterward.

Since 2000 Blacksky LLC has been building quietly and seriously. Federal agencies. Fortune 500 companies. Treasury. USAID. Vanguard. Mastercard. Systems that millions of people depend on without knowing our name. That's fine. The work was real. The delivery was solid. The integrity was non-negotiable.

Then something shifted.

About a year ago I looked at what AI was becoming and I made a decision. Not to chase it. Not to pivot into it because everyone else was. But to build from the inside of it — with 25 years of enterprise architecture behind me and a very clear sense of who technology has historically served and who it has left behind.

I am the great-great-grandson of enslaved people. On both sides. That lineage doesn't carry defeat. It carries determination. Every generation in my bloodline had to figure out new tools just to survive. I get to do it to build.

So I built.

In roughly four months, working alone, bootstrapped with no boots, I shipped eleven products. Symphony — an AI image studio with a representation framework built into the architecture because I got tired of having to manually correct every prompt just to see my own culture reflected back at me. Maurice — an AI sales agent who never sleeps, never has a bad day, and already knows your business cold. WhoIsOurGov — a civic platform tracking all 535 members of Congress, built for the constituents lobbyists have been drowning out for decades. Blacksky NLP — a production grade natural language API priced like we actually want you to use it. BlackskyUp — a free AI apprenticeship program because the pipeline problem starts before the job posting. SlimeHive — a swarm robotics platform modeled on the adaptive intelligence of slime mold. And more.

I published an academic paper. Filed a provisional patent. Got accepted into the Google Cloud startup program. Had a meeting with our GCP liaison and watched him notice the diversity toggle in Symphony before anything else. Built a live public changelog linked to actual Git commits because build in public means the building, not just the posts about it.

I drove for a delivery service at night to keep the lights on while I coded during the day. I am not ashamed of that. That's what it looks like to believe in something when nobody has handed you the resources to make it easy.

The BSM site just got a major update. News posts. Documentation. A real home for the technical and academic work that underpins everything Blacksky is building toward. The Biomimetic Symbiotic Modular node. The NLM paper. The SlimeHive architecture. The vision of infrastructure that works without the grid, without the cloud, without permission from anyone.

That's what this has always been about.

Not disruption. Not exits. Not unicorns.

Infrastructure. For the people who need it most. Built by someone who knows what it means to need it.

Ubuntu. I am because we are.

New tools. New realities.

We are just getting started.

blackskymedia.org

#NewToolsNewRealities #BlackskyLabs #BuildInPublic #BlackFounders #AI #Ubuntu #BSM #SlimeHive

What this is for

The website tells you what we build. The release log tells you what we shipped this week. Neither tells you why something looked the way it did at the moment of building, or what we believed was true about a problem before we started solving it. That's what this is for.

What we'll write about

A handful of recurring beats:

• Lab notes — the small decisions and design questions behind the products in the works.
• Field reports — what we learn from the people using what we build.
• Long reads — when something needs more than a release-log line. Architecture write-ups, post-mortems, technique deep-dives.
• Off-topic — sometimes a music recommendation, sometimes a book.

Why we run a lab in the first place

Ubuntu — a person is a person through other people. Your humanity is bound up in everyone else's.

It's the principle we run on. We build for the communities AI usually overlooks first, because the work is sturdier when it has to hold up there before anywhere else. If you find yourself nodding at any of that, you'll probably get something out of reading along.

Thanks for being here.