About
3D artist turned marketer turned builder of AI tooling. Seven years of Riftwake, a personal server running about forty containers, and a working theory that the transferable skill was always judgement.
Nathan Wong · Singapore
I build things I got tired of doing by hand.
// 3D artist → marketer → AI tooling · none of it planned
What I build
I build AI automation and low-code tooling, most of it for problems I ran into myself and then decided I wasn't willing to keep doing by hand. Some of it is marketing work, competitive share-of-voice modelling and sentiment aggregation that turns into a report somebody senior actually reads, and some of it is closer to home, a job search pipeline, a media server that prunes itself, a set of runbooks that keep me honest. Nearly all of it runs on a personal server I built and maintain myself.
How I got here
I came to this from games design, which is not the route anyone would plan. I graduated with a degree in it and found fairly promptly that nobody was hiring for 3D modelling, and that the few roles which did exist would have paid me as though the degree hadn't happened, which is difficult to accept for work as slow and exacting as 3D is. So I went where the work was, and marketing turned out to have far more overlap with what I could already do than I expected.
Not the route anyone would plan into marketing automation. An unreasonably good one, as it turns out.
What carried over from 3D
What I didn't expect was how much of the 3D work carried over into AI, and this is the part I find genuinely interesting. The fundamental actions in both are not especially hard, in 3D you are pushing vectors around and with AI you are typing replies, and neither of those is the thing that takes years to learn.
What takes years is judgement. Knowing when something is correct and when it is quietly wrong, knowing which part of it to look at first when it breaks, and holding enough of the whole in your head to tell a small problem apart from a structural one.
That is the actual skill in both and it transfers rather completely, which is why I am fairly relaxed about saying that I am not a software engineer and don't pretend to be one. Technologist is the closer word, someone who works across the whole stack rather than deeply into any one layer of it, comfortable enough with networks and servers and models and interfaces to build a working thing end to end and, more usefully, to work out which layer is lying to me when it stops working. I understand AI and enough of how code works to build real tools through it, and most of what makes those tools work is judgement I already had rather than theory I went out and acquired.
Nor is this the first time I have built working things without writing much code. Games development runs heavily on visual scripting, Blueprints in Unreal and node graphs for materials and shaders, where you assemble logic out of boxes and wires instead of syntax, and what you are actually doing there is reasoning about flow and state and about what should happen when something arrives that you never accounted for. Building without code isn't a habit I picked up for AI, it is the tooling I learned on, and the move from wiring nodes together to orchestrating models turned out to be a much shorter step than it sounds.
Riftwake
Before any of that there was Riftwake, an audio project I started in 2019 and have run ever since, which has put out over 450 hours of content and been downloaded more than 145,000 times. I built the whole thing myself, the distribution, the hosting, the membership tiers, the visual identity, and coordinated the people involved across several time zones. Seven years of running something with no off switch teaches you a fair amount about what is worth automating.
The homelab
The infrastructure side is a genuine interest rather than a means to an end. I'm CCNA certified, I self-host everything I depend on, and this site runs on my own hardware alongside about forty other containers. Understanding what happens underneath the tools I use has repeatedly turned out to matter more than I expected it to.
This page is being served from the homelab right now.
Away from the screen
Away from the screen I shoot on a Fuji X-T3, which has done more for how I think about light in a render than any tutorial ever did, and I have an ongoing weakness for fountain pens and stationery. I maintain a Framework laptop for much the same reason I self-host, which is that I would rather use things built to last and designed to be understood than things designed to be replaced.
- Fuji X-T3
- Fountain pens
- Framework laptop
- CCNA
Where I am now
I'm currently looking for work in Singapore, ideally somewhere I can keep building this sort of tooling, and preferably somewhere with enough room to automate parts of the job itself.