Donald “DJ” Waters — engineer, builder, and family-first maker. A living archive of the software, tools, and apps I build for work, for my family, and for the love of it.https://buildwithdj.com/https://buildwithdj.com/writing/ai-operating-system-for-my-family/https://buildwithdj.com/writing/ai-operating-system-for-my-family/Why most of what I make starts at home — and how Hearthwise turned our family's chaos of emails, forms, and deadlines into something we can actually stay on top of.Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://buildwithdj.com/writing/building-cortex/https://buildwithdj.com/writing/building-cortex/Notes from a side project — a brain-inspired cognitive architecture that wraps local LLMs in a prediction-error loop, with hierarchical memory and a world model that trains itself.Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://buildwithdj.com/writing/automating-tier-3-support/https://buildwithdj.com/writing/automating-tier-3-support/What years of the hardest infrastructure escalations taught me about where automation actually pays off — and how I turned repeatable cluster work into one-command runs.Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT