System Online
Location NYC Metro
Status Seeking
Role Dir / VP Engineering

// Engineering Leader //

JERÓNIMO COLÓN III.

// Fifteen Years Building Teams & Products

// Management Profile Stats
Experience 15 YRS
Companies 7+
Teams Led 12+
Uptime 99.9%
Availability Open
[ 01 ] Profile.dat

Fifteen years, a lot of ground covered.

Jerónimo Colón III
IMG_JC3 · ON FILE

My career has spanned financial data services at Lazard and Thomson Reuters, civic technology at Case Commons, consumer SaaS at SinglePlatform, and most recently Tripadvisor, where I led two different product areas across two chapters of my career there.

First, I led two teams on the Restaurants side, where we built and shipped Menu Connect, a syndication platform connecting restaurants to 100+ distribution partners. Then I moved to Experiences, where I led four teams building and scaling Tripadvisor's tours and activities marketplace (think things to do when you arrive at your destination).

What's stayed constant across all of it is how I think about leadership. I'm not a delegator who manages from a distance. I build relationships with the people on my teams, learn what they're trying to grow toward, and create the conditions where that growth can happen. I believe engineers do their best work when they understand the "why" behind what they're building and feel genuine ownership over it.

While still very important, the measure I care most about isn't velocity or uptime. It's whether the people on my teams actually look forward to Monday. An engaged engineer outperforms a disengaged one in every dimension, and fostering that environment is the work I find most meaningful.

I came to software through biology, and that background still shapes how I think: systems, feedback loops, emergent behavior, the gap between what a model predicts and what actually happens. I find that framing useful in engineering organizations.

[ 02 ] On AI

Yes, I'm one of "those people" now.

I'll be honest: I'm having more fun building software right now than I have in years, and AI is mostly the reason why. The distance between "huh, I wonder if…" and a thing actually running on my screen has basically collapsed. For someone who never quite stopped being the kid who wanted to take everything apart to see how it worked, that's catnip.

I don't buy the doom, and I don't completely buy the hype. AI is a wildly capable, occasionally overconfident collaborator - a bit like pairing with a brilliant junior engineer who has read the entire internet and will, given the chance, make up facts with total conviction. So I keep a hand on the wheel and, like a good mentor, I start with a robust plan. I give it room to cook, but I read everything it hands me. The subtle secret is structure - again, creating a robust plan upfront and a self-improving feedback loop.

Mostly, I try whatever crazy ideas that pops into my head - and I do mean every-single-one. I've gone far enough down the meta-rabbit hole that I started building tools to test the tools, and a custom framework for a fully automated, self-improving/self-correcting agent - like totally hands free.

Is it going to change everything? Probably. Am I going to fret about that, or keep building weird and quirky little projects with it and enjoy myself? …Both. Obviously both.

[ 03 ] The Workshop

Stuff I build for fun.

Welcome to the workshop. No roadmaps, no stakeholders, no PRDs — just me, a problem, and whatever tooling I'm nerding out on this week. One project became several, and it hasn't stopped. (The grown-up résumé covers the day job.)

jc3@workshop:~$ ls ./for-fun

M-01 Tidesman AI Tooling Shipped

Giving AI assistants a safe set of hands on Apple's brand-new container runtime. It's an MCP server — the protocol that lets an AI call real tools — exposing nine tools across three safety levels (read-only by default; opt up to safe, then full), from a system health-check to the full container lifecycle: list, run, inspect, logs, exec, stop, kill, delete. Where the community servers just script the command line, this one talks straight to Apple's background engine through its own Swift client library — faster and sturdier. The long game: a full “Playwright for Apple containers.”

Stack · Swift 6.2+ · MCP · macOS / Apple Silicon
M-02 listmy.info Web Live

Shipped, live, and serving real traffic — a two-sided mirror for your web browser. The server half reflects back exactly what your browser broadcasts to every site you visit: raw user agent, request headers, IP, and rough location, echoed straight from my backend. The client half surfaces what your browser quietly knows about you — screen, hardware, GPU, locale, network — none of which ever leaves your device. Every value labeled by source, computed live, and stored nowhere. Built to grow into a suite of small dev tools.

Stack · Next.js/React.js · TypeScript · Python · AWS · Terraform
M-03 Tapas Bar Games Release Candidate

The one that started the spree — a real-time multiplayer, browser-based drafting game. Inspired by the dice-drafting of Sushi Roll, but very much its own thing: its own mechanics, a tapas-bar theme, and a healthy dose of take-that. 2–5 players with lobbies, built serverless so a pile of games can run at once for near-zero idle cost. Code-complete — getting a visual glow-up before the release candidate ships.

Stack · Next.js/React.js · TypeScript · FastAPI/Python · AWS
M-04 Irrigation Planner Home Finalizing

Not a garden gadget — it's a zone-based rotor-pressure estimator for irrigation field techs or your advanced hobbyist. You may be hamstrung by what you can measure at the spigot (static/dynamic pressure and available flow), but what a sprinkler actually delivers depends on the pressure way out at each rotor down the line. Every number is grounded in real hydraulics — Hazen-Williams friction loss, elevation head, orifice-law nozzle flow, even Joukowsky water-hammer — solved as a coupled lateral against published Hunter nozzle-performance tables, so nozzle selection stops being a guess. A pure, deterministic engine with a thin UI on top.

Stack · Next.js/React.js · TypeScript · Tailwind
M-05 Palinode AI Tooling Tinkering/In-Progress

My own working process, codified as a Claude Code plugin anyone can install. It lifts the self-improving learnings loop out of claude-constitution — where each session records what it learned and self-corrects on the next run — and ports it into reusable slash commands, subagents, and hooks. (Aptly named — a palinode is a formal recantation, an author taking back a position they argued in an earlier work. That's the whole idea here: each run learns from the last and corrects course.)

Stack · Claude Code plugin
M-06 AI Eval Harness AI Tooling Finalizing

Because "it feels better" isn't a metric. A harness that measures whether a change to an AI's system directives actually shifts its behavior: adversarial "trap" prompts run against each directive, structural rules auto-graded, the substance blind-judged by a separate model, and results aggregated with Wilson confidence intervals and a two-proportion significance test. Evidence over vibes.

Stack · Python
M-07 claude-constitution AI Tooling Release Candidate

My discipline-in-a-box — a reusable Claude Code “constitution” I stamp onto every new project. One CLAUDE.md, re-read in full at each session start so it survives compaction, enforcing the same non-negotiables everywhere: exhaustive spec before any code, strict TDD, independent audit & review subagents at phase boundaries, and a sign-off protocol for exceptions. Every project in this list is stamped from it.

Stack · Markdown
[ 04 ] Personal Data

Off the clock.

Married, two kids, and a furbaby (who has strong opinions about my work schedule 🐶).

Night owl by nature, which has served me well across time zones and production incidents alike. When I'm not thinking about engineering teams or gaming logic, I'm usually in the weeds of some home networking rabbit hole. The kind that starts with "I should improve my Wi-Fi 7 (6Ghz) coverage" and ends with VLANs for everything (APs, IoT, security devices), dual WAN failover, dedicated switches, and more APs than a home should have, but hey, at least I have amazing coverage. 😉

Away from my computer, I'm into many things (too many). I'd like to think myself a Renaissance Man, but I'm more a Jack of All Trades. I enjoy sci-fi, action and adventure across every format: books, movies, and TV shows. And I'm a longtime dabbler in photography, art, and screenwriting. I also enjoy home improvement and I'm obsessed with car detailing.

// Transmission

"Life's short, live it to the fullest while leaving the world better than you found it."

- JC3