Let's get to know each other! Comment below sharing where you are in the world, a career goal you have, and something you like to do for fun. 😊

Hi all! 👋 I'm Todd, from Tampa I'm an old-timey IT guy and an entrepreneur of 30+ years. I started a dial-up ISP in the mid-90's with Linux and grew it to a post-dot-com-bubble cloud support company (pre GCP), but left IT in 2010. My experience for the last 20ish years has been in business development, spanning real estate, executive coaching, photography, and local government. I left public service in 2023 after the death of the commissioner I was supporting, and was promptly bitten by the ChatGPT bug. I'll be honest that I've been snookered by a couple of other "gurus" and their online communities, and I'm looking for a new online home that aligns with my goals. The financial cost aside, I'm working through the feelings that I wasted much of my time chasing what I was never going to be. What I have been doing is consulting for an SMB doing Claude Teams training and Skill building... I believe the new term is FDE, or Forward Deployed Engineer. I'm working through the Anthropic Academy and hope to be certified and become an Anthropic Partner - if/when they open it back up. Some of my time is building a 3-node Kubernetes cluster and a bare-metal, dual-GPU AI inference server on Linux and vLLM. (pic to catch your attention 😀) This started from my son's summer project - and briefly made me want to switch to DevOps, but now it's the platform for me to build my 2nd brain. I also (try to) balance all this with my love of hockey, being a USA Hockey youth coach for both a 16U travel team and our local JV and Varsity High School hockey teams. Besides being brilliant, my son is a pretty dang good hockey player. 🏒 🥅 So that's me in a nutshell. I'm happy to connect with like-minded people. (disclaimer: all hyphens, em-dashes, and oxford commas are mine. 😂) #AISChallenge

Wanted to introduce myself a little more intentionally. I’m Ryan. I’ve been in marketing/operations for about 9 years, and AI has completely changed the way I think about workflows, systems, and automation these last couple years. I’m especially interested in helping nonprofits and human-centered businesses scale their impact through better organization, follow-up, outreach, and operational systems. A lot of what I care about comes down to: * reducing overwhelm * organizing chaos * building better systems * helping good people operate more effectively Also building almost entirely from my iPad right now which has been a fun challenge in itself. Would love to connect with more people thinking about AI in an ethical and people-centered way.

Not because I didn’t believe AI was big. Because I didn’t believe I was ready. For months, I had a folder on my desktop called “Business Ideas.” Every few weeks I’d open it, watch more videos, save more posts… Then close it again. The story in my head was always the same: “Who are you to charge for this?” “There are people way smarter than you.” “You need more proof first.” So I stayed in learning mode. But learning can become hiding real fast. What changed everything was one conversation with a business owner friend. He wasn’t asking for some insane AI agent architecture. He just wanted someone to explain: - what AI could actually help with - what was a waste of time - and where to even start That’s when it clicked that most business owners are not even looking for the #1 AI expert on earth. They’re just looking for clarity and If you can solve confusion, simplify decisions, and help someone save time or make money, you already have value. You do not need to be the smartest person in the room. You need to be useful. Now, I strongly believe that the gap between where you are now and where someone else is… is already enough to help them. Still got a long way to go myself. But I’m way further ahead than the version of me who kept waiting to feel “ready.” If your story is even somewhat similar to this - Believe me, Just start.

I spent 100 hours testing Claude Code vs ChatGPT Codex and what I found genuinely surprised me. Same prompts, same builds, both tools side by side, and one of them hit way harder than I expected. If you're picking between coding agents right now, then this video is the breakdown you actually need before you commit.