NECESSITY LABS
Independent Software Practice

Built out of necessity, not hype.

Necessity Labs is one person, building real software from the ground up — no team, no funding, no inflated numbers. Just what got built and shipped.

See what's shipped [email protected]

Philosophy

Privacy-first, local-first

On-device AI and ML where it actually matters — instead of shipping your data to someone else's server by default.

No dark patterns

No gamified engagement loops. No manufactured urgency. Software that respects your attention instead of farming it.

One-time purchase, preferred

Subscriptions where they genuinely make sense — not by default. One-time pricing wherever it's viable.

Built by one person

Start to finish. No hand-offs, no committees, no diffusion of responsibility.

Shipped Work

CurioSpark

Shipped

A privacy-first Android note-taking app. On-device Whisper transcription, on-device LLM inference through Gemma via LiteRT, and embeddings-based RAG for search over your own notes. Nothing leaves the device.

On-device Whisper Gemma / LiteRT RAG search Android / Kotlin

Askesis

Shipped

A daily AI coaching companion built on Stoic and Daoist practice. Runs a Socratic session each day, assigns mind/body/soul exercises, and sets reflective journaling prompts to track discipline over time. Fully local-first on Android — encrypted on-device storage, biometric app lock, no backend. Deliberately zero gamification — no streaks, no badges, no "don't break the chain."

Android / Kotlin Room + SQLCipher Claude API On-device only

Necessity Hub

Shipped

Personal backend infrastructure powering necessitylabs.com and other internal tools. Cloudflare Workers for compute, D1 for structured data, R2 for file storage, Durable Objects for stateful coordination. Not a public product — built for personal use.

Cloudflare Workers D1 R2 Durable Objects

Background

01

Marine Corps — Field Artillery

02

Warehouse, Logistics & Manufacturing

~15 years

Real floor-level operations experience — the kind most software people never touch.

03

Along the Way

assorted
Fast food Furniture installation Commercial property restoration Sleep Number bed installation Demolition & carpet removal Newspaper phone customer service
04

Self-Taught Developer

no cs degree

Android/Kotlin, on-device AI/ML, Cloudflare infrastructure — learned by building and shipping, not by classroom.

Twenty years of building things and trying to make a living from it. That's the actual credential.

Not credentialed in every field — but proven, repeatedly, to get functional in unfamiliar domains fast. The drive doesn't turn off when the subject changes.

Open to Hard Problems

Available for freelance and consulting work. Genuinely open to problems outside prior direct experience — if it's real and it's hard, that's usually reason enough to take a serious attempt at it.

Get in touch →
Also, Writes
Vinland — a novel, in progress.
Veil of Echoes — a finished science-fiction and philosophical novel.
A memoir — in progress.