Automate everything.
What's left is human.
One person with modern tooling now ships what used to take a whole engineering team. So here's what I do: I build the systems that take the busywork off your plate. The integrations, the pipelines, the internal tools nobody wants to babysit. The rest is the work that actually needs a person.
I'm Dylan, and Fighting Entropy is my one-human software consultancy. Every engagement is a small wager: I'll leave a system more ordered, more useful, and more alive than I found it, and hand someone on the other end a little more of their life back.
Why this matters
Entropy wins by default. Stars burn out, codebases rot, teams drift apart, attention frays. Fighting it is the whole game: actually creating order where there was none, value where there was waste, and life where there was decay. It's what it means to be alive.
We get one shot at this experience called life. A finite handful of decades to figure out who we want to be, who we want to spend it with, and what we want to build before our energy fades and the lights go out. The hours we spend at work are real hours of our lives. They have to be worth it, both to us and to the people on the other side of what we make.
Software, done well, is one of the most leveraged ways to give people their time back. A well-designed system can do in minutes what used to take weeks. That frees up whole afternoons, even whole careers, for the things that actually matter. Family. Friendship. Creation. Laughter. The experiences that don't fit in a calendar slot.
That's the bet behind every engagement. Whatever we build together, the question I'm quietly asking is whether it leaves real people freer, more capable, and more able to spend the time they have on what they love.
If yes, the work is honest. If not, we're just adding entropy.
What this means in practice
I take on software work across pretty much any domain. Greenfield builds, rescue projects, platform consolidations, ugly integrations, internal tooling, prototypes, technical diligence. If there's a real problem on the other side and the goal is to make something better, I want to hear about it.
I'm especially at home in deep tech and complicated problems (think: billing, regulations, physics, systems with real-world consequences) but I'm a software engineer first. The domain is negotiable. What matters is whether the work is honest, and whether real people are better off when it ships.
If you're not sure whether your project is a fit, that's exactly what the fit check is for. It's free, low-pressure, and the honest answer is sometimes "I'm not the right person for this, but here's who is." Either way, you leave with a clearer picture of the problem and a half-hour of someone genuinely thinking about it with you.
StarCube
Hardware-as-code for small modular reactors.
My flagship engagement, and the one that best reflects why I do this work. We're building a first-of-its-kind platform that brings computing to the entire arc of a nuclear program, from design and simulation through regulatory licensing, so a small team can take a 5–10 MWe microreactor from a diagram to a filing. The bet is simple: design the software tools well enough that agentic workflows carry the grind end to end, and people spend their judgment only where it truly matters.
Cheap, abundant energy is the base-layer constraint on almost everything humans want to build, and the bottleneck isn't the physics. It's the decade of paperwork between a sound design and a license. Compress that toward a year and you don't just ship one reactor; you make the next hundred manufacturable. That's the kind of leverage I love aiming my work at — and my home state is making the case for exactly that.
How we'd work together
Fit Check
A quick call to understand the problem and see if there's a real match before either of us invests more time.
Blueprint Sprint
A bounded engagement that ends with something concrete you keep: an architectural map, a decision document, or a working prototype. It's yours regardless of whether we work together after it.
Ongoing Engagement
For sustained work. Typically part-time or project-based. Remote-first, with on-site availability in New Hampshire and the broader Northeast when it matters.
Where I've gone deep
The track record behind the current work. A few of the other rooms I've spent the most time in. Not a menu, just a sense of the kind of problems I take seriously.
BlueCargo
Senior engineer on the dispute-automation pipeline. It's the engine that audits ocean-freight invoices, catches unfair detention and demurrage charges, and routes them for recovery. Owned chunks of the auditing intelligence and the platform infrastructure underneath it. The system has clawed back over $10M for importers who used to treat those fees as the cost of doing business.
EXO Freight
Senior engineer on Pulse, the core platform serving a flatbed carrier network that grew past 20,000 members. Wrote the banking integrations that paid carriers in minutes instead of waiting weeks on ACH, and stood up the factoring engine that fronted invoices so small operators could keep wheels turning. The plumbing that quietly decides whether a one-truck shop makes payroll.
ecoText
Co-founder and CTO. Built and led a ten-person engineering team that shipped a textbook platform seeded with 100,000+ open-source books, so cash-strapped students didn't have to pick between rent and required reading. Raised $600K to fund the build, and got an honest first lesson in what it costs to make a company exist.