Nathan  Pilkenton

Hi, I'm Nathan. Thanks for visiting my site.

I'm currently based in Nashville, TN, and I create business strategies at IA Collaborative.

Some things I like are: golf, basketball, reading, chess, web app development, choral singing, and the Oregon Ducks.

If you have to optimize, it isn't good enough (08/24)

Personal data is everywhere in public (02/24)

The personal big screen (05/23)

Customizing web search with LLMs (05/23)

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Semiform.ai lets you replace your forms with custom AI agents. It uses the OpenAI function calling API, with Django for the backend and htmx for the frontend.

Bulletyn sends customized daily email digests. You can add content from sources like Reddit, Hacker News, and RSS. I made it for myself, so I would stop spending so much time on Reddit, and it worked...mostly. It's made with Django and htmx.

Chekkin helps teams track and improve their happiness and engagement. It's designed to be simpler and more transparent than existing employee engagement tools. I built the entire back-end and front-end myself using Django, Bootstrap, and jQuery.

weejur is micro-blogging from your email account—just send an email and watch it show up as a post on your site. I built and designed it myself with Django (and just a little Javscript).

I made Hacker Yardage to generate yardage books for any golf course using publicly-available data on OpenStreetMap. The data cleaning, image processing, and distance measurement is all done in Python.

Houdini was a Mac OS X application that allowed the user to easily manipulate "hidden files" typically reserved for system use. I created it in high school, when I needed to delete some hidden files from a USB drive. It was featured on Lifehacker in 2008 and received over 350,000 total downloads on MacUpdate. (You can also open up a new Finder window and use the keyboard shortcut Command + Shift + .  to see hidden files.)

I built this website myself from scratch to learn HTML and CSS. It's gone through many iterations as my skills have grown. My favorite feature from the past is the beard slider.