About & Philosophy
SYSJoel Brubaker
Founding Engineer at Onlook — the open-source visual code editor for React. Building the Cursor for Designers: edit your running app visually, and the code updates. Based in San Diego.
I ship fast, iterate in public, and believe the best tools feel like extensions of thought — invisible until you need them, obvious once you've used them. My workflow is terminal-first, AI-augmented, and optimized for creative velocity.
Operating Principles
Everything Ships
v0 is a pitch page. Don't wait for ready — ship the smallest useful thing, then iterate. Social momentum matters more than polish.
Reduce Friction
If a workflow has unnecessary steps, automate or eliminate them. The best infrastructure is invisible. Hammerspoon, tmux, Docker Swarm — all friction reducers.
Semi-Automation
Machines compose, humans judge. AI drafts tweets, generates code, proposes designs — but a person always makes the final call. Safety gates, not autopilot.
Terminal-First
The terminal is the primary interface. Claude Code, Ghostty, tmux, Bubbletea — everything flows through text. GUIs are for consumption, terminals are for creation.
Own the Stack
Self-hosted infrastructure over vendor lock-in. Docker Swarm over Kubernetes. SQLite over managed databases. Complexity should match the problem, not the hype.
Institutional Knowledge
Capture what you learn. Devlogs, CLAUDE.md files, skills, traces — make knowledge durable and shareable. The best documentation explains why, not just what.
Digital Pine
Digital Pine is a community of AI-native builders — a small group of forward-thinking people who use AI not as a novelty, but as a native part of how we create. We ship fast, think big, and help each other build what's next.
We don't wait for handoffs. Members scope, ship, and iterate — from product thinking to infrastructure to go-to-market. AI amplifies what one person can do. The infrastructure runs on a shared Docker Swarm over Tailscale, and the culture prioritizes creative experimentation and institutional knowledge capture.
Development Workflow
Shape
Ideas start as shaped concepts — problem, appetite, boundaries. Obsidian notes become pitch pages via Kindling Pages.
Build
Claude Code with 59 custom skills handles scaffolding, auditing, and deployment. Gemini CLI runs parallel design explorations.
Ship
Docker Swarm deploys via `docker stack deploy`. Dispatch watches commits and tweets the interesting ones. Everything gets a URL.