who

I am Nick Oak.

I am mostly an engineer, in the broad and slightly dangerous sense of the word. I like when a vague itch turns into a working tool, a benchmark, a repo, a paper draft, a demo, or at least a properly documented dead end.

Current gravity wells: agent infrastructure, local AI for factories, CUDA math, Gaussian splats, edge hardware, and the general problem of making AI work feel less like chat and more like operating a real system.

The recurring loop is simple enough to be suspicious:

1. itch
2. note
3. experiment
4. repo / demo / paper
5. postmortem
6. better itch

how to read this

This site is not a polished personal brand per se. It is a public field notebook with receipts attached where possible.

Some posts are essays. Some are lab notes. Some are public self-interruptions because a thought has escaped the cellar of mind before becoming a clean artifact. Treat speculation as speculation until it is backed by a repo, demo, benchmark, paper, or postmortem.

why public

I have a weird relationship with publishing. I love building and writing; I have historically been suspiciously good at not pressing the final "publish" button.

So this site is a forcing function and a serendipity net. The goal is not mass approval. The goal is that one rare useful person, problem, repo, or argument can find the work and collide with it.

Public-OK beats private-perfect. I am repeating this line mostly for myself.

where to go

Read why for the field notes. Read what for projects, tools, and receipts. GitHub is the artifact layer: buildoak.

If any of this rhymes with what you are building, thinking about, or trying to understand, feel free to write. No pitch needed. Half-formed ideas, adjacent thoughts, weird questions, and "oh, this reminds me of..." are all proper reasons to catch up. buildoak@proton.me