Nicholas “Nico” Newhouse
Popcorn Eating Unicorn
I make complicated things less stupid.
Drones · Emergency Response · Media · AI · Automation · Probably another side project
Popcorn Eating Unicorn
I make complicated things less stupid.
Drones · Emergency Response · Media · AI · Automation · Probably another side project
Percentages independently verified by absolutely nobody.
I was never particularly good at school.
More accurately, I was never particularly good at learning in the way school expected me to.
Sitting still, following a fixed path and learning something because I was told I should never worked especially well for me.
Give me a problem I actually care about, though, and things are very different.
I can disappear into something new, teach myself what I need to know, build it, break it, start again and lose considerably more hours to it than was probably reasonable.
As I have got older, I have realised that I actually love learning.
I just like learning by doing.
That is probably the common thread between media, cameras, drones, emergency response, software, AI, automation and the many strange side projects I have become obsessed with over the years.
So, yes.
Problembarn.
Just perhaps not for quite the reason my teachers thought.
I have a tendency to get stuck on things other people have learned to live with.
Why are we doing it this way?
What are we actually trying to achieve?
Who needs this?
What happens before and after this step?
Could we make it simpler?
Is there a better way?
And only then: is there a tool that could do this better?
Sometimes the answer is a new system.
Sometimes it is an automation.
Sometimes it is changing one stupid step.
And sometimes, annoyingly, the old way was right.
I work somewhere between technology, people and operations.
These days that means drones, emergency response, workflows, automation, AI, training, operational systems and a suspicious number of APIs.
A lot of my work starts by understanding what somebody is actually trying to achieve, what is getting in the way, and what a sensible way of doing it would look like.
Sometimes that becomes software. Sometimes a workflow. Sometimes a procedure, training course, integration, drone operation or small tool.
I often sit between technical people, operational teams and management, translating what each side needs into something people can actually use.
Technology for its own sake does not interest me very much.
Making it useful does.
A searchable memory of meetings, conversations, ideas and decisions.
Ask for a link →A local-first activity and project tracker for Chromebook, because the existing options did not quite fit.
Ask for a link →Connecting pilot certifications, flight records and operational systems without people manually copying data around.
Ask for a link →A visual thinking and content-planning tool for cards, freeform ideas and AI sketches.
Ask for a link →Small interactive tools for making technical subjects easier to understand.
Ask for a link →Experiments that exist mainly because I wanted to know if they could work.
Ask for a link →Do people actually read this far down?
Need dates, job titles and the sensible version? My LinkedIn profile has those.
Okay. I’ll go with this.Not looking for a job. Just curious about things.
If you have a weird problem, a good question or just want to say hi, press the button.