About
I'm a technology enthusiast with a love for the outdoors.
I'm currently working on some solo projects, like Lucive, which is a private journaling app for Apple devices, and Hometrace, a SaaS platform for home inspectors. Taking this step to work for myself has been incredibly liberating.
In early 2022, I reconfigured a lot of my life to work remotely and I moved out of the Bay Area. I have no desire to go back to an office building. You can find me around the mountains in Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah these days.
Previously, I was a product manager at Secureframe, Doma (real estate tech), and eBay. Some of the products I helped build:
- Secureframe Trust, Third Party Risk Management: AI-based tools to automate customers' compliance with security controls for software suppliers.
- Doma Intelligence Platform: A title and escrow processing software suite that uses machine intelligence to eliminate the closing time for home refis and purchases.
- eBay HelpBot: HelpBot is a product backed by a natural language understanding engine to automatically resolve issues on eBay members' behalf.
Projects and interests
Most of my interests center around stories of one kind or another. There's nothing I love better than a well-told tale, be it in writing, the spoken word, film, video games, or virtual reality. I also like pushing myself to do things that lend themselves to storytelling. My main themes:
Technology. I really love building apps and making things with my own hands. You can find me on GitHub here.
Adventure travel. I like to film mini-documentaries about backpacking, scuba diving, skiing, mountaineering, fishing, and camping around the world with Fiona, my wife. Life is short and the world is beautiful.
Military history and national security topics. What can I say? My dad was a fighter pilot. I'm a big fan of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast, books like Maxwell Hastings' "Inferno: The World at War 1939-1945" and War on the Rocks. I've written about the terrifying series of nuclear weapons accidents during the Cold War. I'm also transfixed and horrified by the events in Ukraine.
Beer brewing: I publish reports about my experiments here. I also put together a longer piece about getting started:
Nick Roberts
Aviation. I am a certificated private pilot. I don't fly too much these days, but I have a deep appreciation for the craft.
Systems of productivity and personal betterment. I've written a bit about my own system, which blends the "Getting Things Done" methodology with other habits and home-grown processes. I like having clear goals to track toward, but I try to keep the system lightweight. At the end of each year, I count up various metrics related to my health, happiness, relationships and more. See my roundups of 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, and reflections upon turning 30.
Virtual reality and video games. I didn't grow up with a game console as a kid and so I'm making up for it now. In early 2020 I custom-built a PC and, ever since, I've been exploring open-world games, mostly.
Logs
I love lists and logs from people I follow (check out James Clear's reading list, for example). I wrote my lists mostly as a record for personal reference, but figured they also might be interesting to friends. Here are two that I maintain:
Nick Roberts
Nick Roberts
