I've owned nateschulz.com since 2005. That's long enough that I remember what it felt like to register a domain and mean it.
The Early Days
The site started as a discovery platform — a home for the small online tools I was building at the time. PHP, MySQL, hosted on actual Mac Minis co-located at MacMiniColo (they're still around, now called MacMiniVault). If you weren't doing that in 2005, the mental model was: you rented space in a rack, your server was a Mac Mini, and you prayed the drive didn't fail.
It was scrappy. It was fun. I was shipping things I'd built myself to real users, and the site was how they found me.
The Dormant Years
Then the day job took over.
BigTech has a way of absorbing the part of your brain you used to spend on your own projects. The hours are real, the problems are interesting, and the teams are good — so you pour into that, and nateschulz.com quietly becomes a placeholder. A forwarding address. Something you mean to get back to.
I left it that way for a long time.
The Rebuilds
Every few years, something pulls me back. A new tool I want to try. A design direction I'm curious about. An itch that the day job doesn't scratch.
Each rebuild has been a read on where I am technically and what I think is worth caring about. The early versions were about shipping. Later ones were about design systems, performance, the craft of the thing. This is the latest.
What This One Is About
This rebuild sits at an intersection I've been thinking about for a while: VibeCoding and sanity.
VibeCoding — if you haven't encountered the term — describes the emerging practice of building software through conversation with an LLM rather than writing every line by hand. You describe what you want. The model drafts it. You react, redirect, refine. The velocity is genuinely different. So is the experience of authorship.
The sanity part is the counterweight. LLM tooling in 2026 is powerful and occasionally wrong in ways that are hard to catch. The models are confident regardless of correctness. The output can look right without being right. Working effectively in this environment requires more judgment, not less — a clearer sense of what you're building and why, so you can evaluate what you're given.
This site is an experiment in holding both of those things at once.
Watching Closely
I don't know where LLM tooling lands in five years. Nobody does — including the people building it. What I do know is that the transition happening right now, in the tools available to individual developers, is real and worth paying attention to.
nateschulz.com has always been where I pay attention to things by building with them. Twenty years in, that part hasn't changed.
Here's to another rebuild. Hoping for the best.