Valley Center, Kansas · Wichita metro
Nathan Collins
Software developer and builder of internal tools. Six years at a large aerospace manufacturer — intern, then developer, then lead developer on a customer eCommerce site, now testing lead on an ERP program. At home I run a self-hosted platform where AI agents build, test and operate the software alongside me, and a small web-design shop on top of it.
The résumé covers the day job. This site covers the rest.
What I do
Ship software people depend on
Customer-facing eCommerce, internal line-of-business apps, integrations with the systems a manufacturer actually runs on. Requirements through delivery, including the unglamorous parts: data migrations, legacy framework upgrades, and the release that cannot go wrong.
Remove the manual step
The thread through everything since I was a welder: find the repetitive process, and build the thing that removes it. Lately that means scripted automation against ERP systems, and agents that generate and execute the work under review.
Operate a real platform
A hypervisor host, containers by role, zero-trust access, CI/CD with gated promotion and automatic rollback, monitoring, patching and backups that page me when they fail. Built at home because that is where I get to own every layer.
Work with AI agents as a practice
Not a chatbot habit: written guardrails agents must follow, a single board carrying state between sessions, a review path where proposed changes are gated on green CI. In 2026 that is the skill worth demonstrating rather than claiming.
Skills
- Engineering
- C# / .NET (Core, MVC, Blazor, ASP.NET, Web API), REST APIs and webhooks, Python, JavaScript, React, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Oracle
- Automation & AI
- Power Platform, SAP GUI scripting, agent workflows, MCP tooling, document ingestion and summarization, local model execution
- Delivery
- Agile facilitation, backlog ownership, user stories and acceptance criteria, mentoring, leading contractors, testing strategy across a large program
- Testing
- Azure DevOps test management, business scenario design, pytest, Playwright, API contract tests
- Platform & ops
- Linux, Docker, virtualization and containers, CI/CD pipelines, Cloudflare (Workers, Tunnel, Access), Azure, AWS, monitoring and alerting
- The human detail
- Certified welder, 2012. It is where the "build the tool that removes the manual step" instinct comes from.
The full tour
The detailed version is behind a key: project deep-dives with real outcome numbers, a month-by-month build timeline, a ledger of experiments that failed and what they taught, the sanitized architecture, the business numbers, and live demos. Nothing in it is confidential — the key just keeps it out of search results and away from casual scanners.
Elsewhere
I run Collins Web Co, a small web-design shop for local businesses — built and hosted on the same platform, which is why it appears here as a project rather than a distraction.