Senior software engineer · Healthcare
Systems that keep working when things go wrong.
I'm Nate Parker. For the past five years I've built and defended the platform at a healthcare software company — mostly Elixir and Ruby on Rails, with a security practice running underneath all of it.
Currently
Senior engineer at a healthcare startup, where I've spent five years on the same codebase — long enough to have opinions about what actually keeps software alive. Right now I'm the primary engineering resource on our push toward a top-tier healthcare security certification, which is turning out to be less about paperwork than about finally fixing the things everyone already knew were wrong.
Outside of that: CTFs, reverse engineering, and a homelab that mostly exists so coding agents have somewhere to work while I sleep.
Writing
3 recentHerdr and the overnight homelab
Coding agents are useful right up until you close your laptop. Here's how I gave mine somewhere to live, and the guardrails I put around them first.
Replacing Clockify with 200 lines of Elixir and a SQLite file
I wanted a timer I could start on my laptop and stop from my phone, without an account. Here's Punch — and why the single-running-timer rule lives in the database instead of the application.
I argued against embeddings. Then I ran them on my own hardware.
A week after shipping trigram matching, I replaced it with semantic search using Bumblebee, Nx and pgvector. The objection I had wasn't to embeddings — it was to the API key.