Let me start with something that might not be in most developer bios:
I’ve been in places where technology didn’t just matter — it was the difference between mission success and something far worse. As a US Army veteran with 10+ years of active service and two combat deployments to Afghanistan, I learned about systems, signals, and satellites in environments where downtime has a very different definition than a 500 error.
That background shapes everything I build today.
From El Campo to the Cloud
I grew up in El Campo — a small community in the Dominican Republic where your options are limited but your imagination isn’t. I moved to the United States in 2000, ended up joining the Army, and spent the next decade operating in signal intelligence, drone operations, satellite communications, and field electronics across two combat tours in Afghanistan.
When I came home, I did what any reasonable veteran does: I went to college and joined the track team.
At Universidad del Turabo in Gurabo, Puerto Rico (now SUAGM / Ana G. Méndez University), I studied Business Administration with an Information Systems concentration. I also happened to win Triple Jump and Long Jump at Las Justas every year I competed, took silver in the Decathlon, and represented the Dominican Republic as a national track and field athlete.
I’ve always liked doing things at full speed.
The AI Moment — And Why It Feels Different
I’ve watched a lot of tech waves from the sidelines and from inside them. But what’s happening right now with AI — specifically with agentic AI — feels genuinely different. And I don’t mean “different” in the way every tech trend claims to be paradigm-shifting. I mean different in the way that learning to operate a drone in 2005 felt different from everything that came before it.
The shift isn’t that AI can generate text. It’s that AI can now act.
Agents that browse the web, write and run code, manage workflows, make decisions — and do all of it autonomously, in loops, correcting themselves as they go. The Claude API. MCP servers. Tool-calling. Memory. This is not autocomplete anymore. This is a genuinely new way to build software.
I’ve been all in since the moment I understood what it actually was.
What I’m Building: tend.host
The first project that came out of this obsession is tend.host.
The premise is simple: hosting is still more painful than it needs to be — deployments, uptime monitoring, configuration drift, incident response. Most of the work is repetitive, procedural, and honestly? A well-designed AI agent could handle 80% of it.
tend.host is a managed hosting platform where AI agents are baked into the operations layer. Your servers, maintained intelligently. Anomalies caught before they become outages. Routine operations automated away. The human stays in the loop for decisions that actually require judgment — not for rebooting things at 3 AM.
It’s early. It’s ambitious. It’s exactly the kind of project that the Army trained me for, even if the Army didn’t know it at the time.
And tenddash
tenddash is the companion product — a unified command center for your digital infrastructure.
If you’ve ever managed more than one server, one deployment, one DNS zone — you know the pain. You’re bouncing between five dashboards, two terminal windows, and a prayer. tenddash pulls it all into one place: deployments, uptime, alerts, cost, logs. Clarity, not chaos.
The two products work together by design. tend.host handles the operations. tenddash gives you the view. Together, they’re what I want to exist in the world — and since nobody else was building it the way I wanted, I’m building it myself.
The Home Office
I do this work surrounded by the world’s most chaotic support system:
My daughter Liberty — my youngest, who has a sixth sense for interrupting deep work and has recently started reviewing my UI decisions with strong opinions. She’s four. She’s not wrong.
My boys Wilkin and Alex, my older daughter Catherine (whom I had when I was 17 — life, as they say, had its own roadmap, and I’ve made my peace with it and built something I’m proud of), and my cat Bailey, who competes with Liberty for my attention and is currently losing.
Between the family chaos, the drone photography, the gym sessions, and the agentic code that runs while I sleep — this is a good life. One I built piece by piece, from El Campo to here.
What Comes Next
This blog is where I’ll think out loud about:
- AI and agentic system design — what’s working, what’s not, what I’m learning
- tend.host and tenddash — building in public, honest about the hard parts
- The intersection of military thinking and engineering — there’s more overlap than you’d expect
- 360° photography and aerial work — because not everything has to be about code
- And whatever else feels worth writing down
If you’ve read this far, I’d love to hear from you. Hit [email protected] — I read everything.
Welcome to the site. Let’s build something worth building.
— Wilkin