AI and LLM
Claude API, OpenAI, Perplexity. Agentic workflows, tool use and function calling, structured outputs, multi-model routing, multi-turn context management, prompt and context architecture, MCP, evaluation harnesses.
About
I build early and the world catches up.
Three decades of production software. AI-native builds for the past two years. I have shipped things a few years before the market had a name for them, more than once.
Three decades, one throughline.
I taught myself to code on a 14.4 modem in Baton Rouge. Since then I have built enterprise systems for Wells Fargo, General Electric, and Blue Cross Blue Shield, architected an FDA-cleared telehealth platform, built a software department from zero for a Gulf South oilfield services company, and focused on AI-native builds for the past two years.
The throughline is being early, being hands on, and shipping things that still run after I leave.
Selected credentials
The three that matter.
There is a longer list. These are the ones that say something a client can use.
2006
Co-Author, Microsoft .NET Architecture Certification Exams
Microsoft brought me to Redmond, where I co-wrote the exams Microsoft used to certify .NET architects. It is a peer-reviewed credential in the truest sense: other architects had to agree the exams were right.
2012
LILAH, FDA-cleared remote patient monitoring
Product owner and engineering lead on LILAH (Living Independent Life At Home), a remote patient monitoring platform cleared by the FDA under 510(k) K120941 and again under K130360. I named the platform and designed its threshold-based alerting model: caregiver-set limits on a patient's vitals that trigger alerts to family and care teams. That model is an architecture now common across remote patient monitoring. Named 2012 Louisiana Technology Product of the Year.
Present
Director, New Orleans Startup Grind
I run the city's grassroots AI adoption: bi-weekly AI meetups, hands-on coding workshops, and a standing room where founders, engineers, and operators work out what these tools actually do. I teach this material because teaching it is how you find out what you really know.
Certified
MCDBA and MCSD
Microsoft Certified Database Administrator and Microsoft Certified Solution Developer. SQL Server administration, performance tuning, T-SQL, and migration, with production work since 1997 behind the certifications.
Stack
What I work in.
Current, in production, hands on keys.
Cloud and edge
Cloudflare Workers, Pages, D1, KV, R2, Queues, Wrangler. Supabase PostgreSQL with row-level security. Serverless, multi-tenant architecture by default.
Backend and data
C# and .NET across ASP.NET Core, MVC, Razor Pages, Entity Framework. SQL Server, T-SQL, stored procedures, performance tuning, data warehousing with SSIS, SSRS, SSAS. PostgreSQL schema design.
Application layer
TypeScript, Node.js, Astro, React. Stripe billing with idempotent webhooks, SendGrid, OAuth, third-party API integration with graceful degradation.
Engineering practice
Azure DevOps, Git, CI/CD pipelines, Agile and Scrum. Code review discipline, root-cause debugging in distributed environments, async-first written documentation.
Leadership
Built a software department from zero: hired and mentored eight-plus engineers, lifted on-time delivery from 45% to 85%, and cut production defects 60% through engineering governance.
The pattern is consistent. Telehealth architecture in 2012, before telehealth was an industry. Digital grassroots organizing in 2009. Agentic AI now, from New Orleans. I build early, and the world catches up.
Rob Gaudet
Beyond the code
Where the operational instincts come from.
Software is one half of the background. The other half happened in disaster zones and on camera, and it is the half that tends to be useful when a project is really about getting people to move.
2016–
Founder, Ground Force Humanitarian Aid
I founded the disaster relief nonprofit formerly known as Cajun Navy Ground Force after the historic 2016 Louisiana floods, coordinating tens of thousands of citizen rescues through social media in ten days. Twenty-plus deployments since, across Harvey, Irma, Michael, Laura, Ian, and Helene. I created SAFE Camp, the forward operating base model, funded by the Walmart Foundation, and directed a twelve-week Hurricane Ian response that moved more than $10M in aid. A 501(c)(3) with Candid Gold transparency, focused on the elderly and disabled survivors most often left behind.
Running field logistics under real pressure is where I learned that data, operations, and communication are one discipline, not three.
Reach
Media, audience, and moving people
A published author with Pelican Publishing on citizen-led disaster response. Television host of Mutant Weather, a ten-part series on climate change and coastal flooding. Dozens of live national television appearances across Fox Business, CNN, and national news, plus features in USA Today, Reuters, the Washington Post, and the BBC.
I built audiences from nothing, including one over 200,000 that reached tens of millions of people a year and funded roughly a million dollars of annual relief. Keynote at the 2019 National Association of Attorneys General Capitol Forum in Washington, at the invitation of the Louisiana Attorney General. Speaker at The Wharton School.
Leadership
Teams, departments, and volunteers
Built a software department from zero for a Gulf South oilfield services company: hired and mentored eight-plus engineers, lifted on-time delivery from 45% to 85%, and cut production defects 60%. Directed hundreds of volunteers across multi-week deployments in conditions where the plan changes hourly.
Most technical problems in a company are not technical. Knowing the difference is most of the job.
Why this matters to you
Build it, then get people to use it.
Most AI projects fail on adoption: nobody explains the thing well enough, nobody drives it into daily use, nobody tells the story that makes people want it.
I have spent three decades on the engineering side and a decade on the communication side, at national scale. When your system needs to actually land inside an organization or in front of a market, that is not a separate hire.
