Build it, run it, verify it.

I'm Wilson Hailey, a software engineer in Austin. I build things that teach, automate, and ship — edtech apps, agentic AI systems, games, and the self-hosted infrastructure that keeps all of it running.

The engineering thread: I've delivered paid client work buildingagentic AI systems — multi-agent pipelines that read, reason, and act on real data (IX Biomedical, Orion) — and I run aself-hosted homelab: Proxmox, a GPU node, a fleet of services in containers, everything exposed through Cloudflare Tunnels instead of open ports. When I say something runs in production, it runs on hardware I own and maintain.

The other half: teaching

I'm also a teacher. I studied Chinese literature at Beijing Language and Culture University, lived in China for over a decade, and served as an official interpreter at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. I designed the first-ever foreign-teacher English program for Xueersi (TAL Education), one of China's largest education companies. Today I work in the International Program at St. Stephen's Episcopal School in Austin — matching international students with host families (an app I built cut that process's turnaround by more than half) — and I teach Chinese.

That half leaks into my engineering on purpose. The projects I'm proudest of are the ones my own kids use every day: achore system built on an NFC scanner and a gamified points engine, and a study platform that runs spaced-repetition flashcards and adaptive quizzes. Building for real users — children, students, families — means engagement design and reliability aren't abstract; they're the product.

The throughline

Everything I build follows the same loop: build it, verify the output, then trust it. That habit came out of client work — agentic pipelines only got trustworthy once I added a human-in-the-loop gateway and made the system prove its answers instead of asserting them. It's why this site documents what I built, what broke, and how I fixed it.

Right now

This site is a hybrid: a personal blog recording the fun things I'm building, and a portfolio I can point any potential employer at. I'm open to roles across edtech, AI, and game engineering, and I'm always up for interesting client work.