This is my Now Page: some updates on the things happening in my life, right now!

If we haven’t talked in a while, this is a lot of what I’d update you about if we were to sit down for a coffee! 😊☕ (Which, we totally should soon! Let’s connect!)

Last updated March, 2025.

Professional

I’m currently the Localization Director for Waha, where we make tools to make it simple to learn how to follow Jesus, and to help others to do the same.

Waha is an app that has a 500+ lesson curriculum, currently in almost 40 languages. My job has been to make the localization (/translation) systems and workflows a lot faster and easier. I’m working closely with teams of native volunteers, with the goal of having over 100 languages available on the app by the end of 2026!

Waha had fewer than 20 languages when I joined, so we’re making good progress!

I’ve been able to work with the Waha team to implement some really exciting improvements! One of my favorites has been designing and building a workflow that used to require 6+ months of volunteer work by a speaker of our target language, and now requires just a few minutes of human labor and less than an hour of compute time.

It’s hard to express how much of an improvement it is to go from 6 months of work per language to less than an hour of compute!

We also took part in Gloo’s 2024 AI & The Church Hackathon, where we won a prize for our project, TimeStampAudio.com (which has been an important piece of building the workflow I described above).

Personal

I recently married the love of my life, Kamila Buitrago Guerra, just outside of Bogotá, Colombia.

And we’re planning another celebration of our wedding in June in Saskatchewan for our Canadian friends and family!

Marriage is a wonderful thing! With the right person, I highly recommend it ❤️

We’re currently training to run the Carrera Verde Colombia, a 10K run for ecological restoration in Colombia. It’s my first time training for a running event, so I’m learning lots!

Skill Development / Hobbies

I’m actively learning a number of skills that I’m either putting towards hobbies, hoping to apply professionally, or benefiting from personally. Here’s the main ones!

AI Agents and Automation

I’ve been working my way through HuggingFace’s AI Agents Course, and practicing building some agents and automations. I’ve built myself an executive assistant agent as a Telegram bot, which I use to help manage my calendar. I also just built a money management agent, that Kami and I have been using to help manage our finances.

I’ve been especially interested and focusing in on working with Open Source AI models, as it seems like it provides TONs of the benefits of working with AI, with much fewer of the downsides.

Permaculture Water Management

In 2022, I got certified as a Permaculture Designer at the Greening the Desert project in Jordan. We learned (among many other things) how to design landscapes to be able to thrive through both drought and flooding, and how to build resilient agriculturally productive ecosystems that can continue to provide for people in the midst of a changing climate. I was hoping in 2023 to start making use of my new-found permaculture skills, but switching to full-time earthquake relief mode dampened that goal. However, now in 2025, I’m planning on picking that up again by taking Oregon State University’s Permaculter Water Management course.

I know so many people and places that have been effected by either droughts or flooding. More every month, it seems.

There are functional, viable solutions to make navigating these climate challenges easier.

So I want to learn how to do that! And hopefully some day build an organization that uses that to help people!

Hardware Development

Last year I went pretty deep down the rabbit-hole of learning to prototype hardware devices with the ESP32. I had never worked with microcontrollers before, but was able to use a ESP32 development board to build a “work alike prototype” of a device for content distribution for Waha, in just a few days of work.

I then gave that to a friend with electrical engineering skills, and he was able to draw up a PCB of our design, and get it actually made. In a few more days, we had a “looks-alike, works-alike prototype” of the device that we’re now working on exploring manufacturing paths for.

I find myself SHOCKED at how accessible inventing really amazing, cool new digital devices can be.

To be able to prototype a brand-new electronic device in less than a month, for just a few hundred dollars of investment is insane. If you have a 3D printer, a microcontroller dev-kit, some grit and persistence to learn, and maybe a bit of help from an AI assistant, it’s shocking what you’re able to build today!

I’m already looking forward to finding the time to build my next hardware project!

Spanish

I’ve basically always been a language nerd.

Now, that language nerdiness has some higher stakes! My parents-in-law don’t speak English, so I’m working to learn Spanish to be able to communicate with them better!

When I learned other languages in the past, I had more time to be able to put towards that goal.

Now, working primarily in English on the executive leadership team of a growing non-profit, plus all the other things I’ve been working on, it has been a challenge to find the time to learn!

But, I’m still pushing in to do what I can! That’s one of the reasons I designed the Interlinear Audio Bible. I’m also thinking about building an AI agent to help me with the learning process too (specifically, possibly building an Anki deck management bot that helps me dial in on exactly what vocabulary and rules it would be most beneficial for me to learn, when).

When time is crunched, maximizing the value of every learning moment is important… luckily, it’s easier than ever to do that with the tools that are available today. So, I’m thankful for that!