Why this site exists

For the past year my job title has been AI Strategist at Colorado State University. That sounds like someone who sits in a glass office pointing at hype-cycle charts. In practice, it means I’m the person campus calls when “we should do something with AI” needs to become a thing that exists: an API gateway researchers can actually use, an agent that answers accurately, or a governance answer that holds up when legal counsel reads it.

Most of that work is invisible outside the rooms where it happens. This site is where I make it visible.

What’s here

Projects. Working systems and the institutional work around them, described honestly, including what I’d do differently. Right now that’s a self-service AI API gateway for researchers, a personal memory server that every AI assistant I use shares, the method behind campus agents that hold up in production, and the governance and adoption work that determines whether any of it matters.

Writing. Notes from the build. Not AI hype, not doom. The practical middle: what worked, what didn’t, and what I think it means if you’re trying to do something similar.

Who this is for

Both of you, hopefully. If you’re new to this stuff, I’ll tell you what things are before assuming you care about them; you should be able to read any page here without a glossary. If you’re deep in it, the architecture and the hard-won details are all there too, and headers exist so you can skip my explanations of what MCP is.

Fair warning

My GitHub handle is doofusdavid, which should set expectations about how seriously I take myself. The work, though, I take very seriously. Twenty years of shipping web systems taught me that technology adoption is mostly an organizational problem, and AI is no exception: the models are ahead of most institutions’ ability to absorb them, and that gap is where the interesting work lives.

My bias is toward showing over telling. I’d rather demo a prototype than present a maturity framework. But I’ve also learned that the prototype only matters if the governance, guidance, and adoption work happens around it, so this site covers both halves: the things I’ve built, and the institutional change that made them stick.

If you’re doing similar work, in higher ed or anywhere else, I’d genuinely like to compare notes. You can find me on the about page.