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About Nick

Infrastructure-first builder with a product operator mindset.

Nick Wharton is an IT Director by day and a self-hosted systems builder by night. The same operator running enterprise storefronts also maintains a 20-machine AI fleet, ships products, and keeps client systems stable.

The through-line is ownership — own the infrastructure, understand the blast radius, and build software that can survive real operations, not just a demo day screenshot.

tinyblue.dev is the operating portfolio: case studies, targeted landing pages, direct conversion paths, and enough context to decide quickly whether there's a fit.

Most of what shows up here is one person doing the full stack — kernel to checkout — without a platform team behind it.

20
Machines

Home, work, VPS, mobile nodes

20
AI Agents

Fleet-wide persistent agents

9
Live Sites

Products & client work in production

29
Namespaces

Production k8s namespaces

77
Models

Selectable AI models across EXO and Ollama

$0
Cloud Bills

Core AI and infra stay self-hosted

Notable wins

Proof beats slides.

  • 01

    Delivered a real portfolio that doubles as a working AI surface instead of a static brochure.

  • 02

    Turned owned hardware into a flexible AI and product platform for multiple live businesses.

  • 03

    Maintains systems that span consumer experiences, internal tools, and sensitive client workflows.

How Nick works

Senior generalist with ops realism.

IT Director handling enterprise e-commerce, tax, shipping, and internal ops.

Builder of a 20-machine self-hosted AI fleet with persistent agent workflows.

Ships consumer products, operational tooling, client systems, and experiments from the same stack.

Contributor mindset shaped by open-source tools including EXO and OpenClaw.

Media kit

Short bio, long bio, and the basics.

A simple media kit makes it easier to share the work, reuse a bio, or grab a resume summary without hunting around.

Short bio

Nick Wharton is an IT Director and self-hosted infrastructure builder based in Kansas City. He runs a 20-machine AI fleet, ships products across multiple domains, and builds systems with zero patience for unnecessary cloud rent.

Long bio

tinyblue.dev is the public portfolio for Nick Wharton — a solo operator working across infrastructure, AI systems, full-stack development, and client delivery. The site highlights live systems, not conceptual mockups, with an emphasis on owned hardware, operational clarity, and shipping software that can survive real use.

Timeline

A compact story arc.

Day job, fleet build-out, products, and the operating portfolio itself.

Day job

IT Director at Strange Music

Enterprise storefronts, tax systems, shipping operations, network/admin support.

Homelab era

Built the S.A.M fleet

Turned a home infrastructure obsession into a multi-node AI platform.

Product stretch

Shipped Get Your Crocs Off, SmurfVillage, CardsCloud

Applied the same stack to commercial products and consumer experiences.

Today

tinyblue.dev as operating portfolio

The site itself became a product, routing visitors directly into case studies and AI-assisted exploration.