About Nick DeTello

I’m Nick DeTello, Nicholas on anything official. When I was nine, the oldest computer in the house gave up on one of my father’s dying floppies in a minute - and the same disk copied perfectly if you sent it over the network and waited an hour. Nobody could tell me why. I’ve been in roughly that business since.

I came into software sideways: a two-year degree, a support desk, then a tool called Merby I wrote to get off it. It worked. That got me hired to write software. The CS degree came later, at night.

Work

Most of what I’ve done for a living is getting systems that were never designed together to agree with each other: hospital interfaces, avionics data models, two sources of legislative data telling different stories about the same bill, and lately on my own time, a car’s diagnostic bus. The failure mode in that kind of work is never a crash. So I’ve ended up caring most about the parts of software that can be wrong without telling you, and about checking the result against something that doesn’t share my assumptions.

I build the smallest thing that does the job, out of stock parts wherever they exist, and I want a stranger to be able to rebuild it from one command. That’s pushed me down the stack - toward hardware buses, decode tables, reproducible builds, and the odd CTF. The blog and GitHub have the current state of that.

The projects here are what I build on my own time - the big one is BillTracker, a legislative-tracking app a few thousand people use. It’s Elixir and Phoenix LiveView on NixOS, and it’s the reason I’ll reach for that stack again. I have a day job in defense software.

Beyond code

Off the keyboard I’m on a mountain, under a barbell, or in a departure lounge - fifteen countries in the last two years. My French is passable and my Turkish is not.