Door 1 · Meet Mike · three ways in
Work with the operator, three ways.
Three concrete things you can buy from the operator behind RIG — a call, a stage, or the apparatus itself. Pick one. The rest of this page is the receipts.
An Iowa kid who never stopped building the instrument.
— oskaloosa, iowaBorn in Oskaloosa, Iowa — a town where you fix the thing yourself or it stays broken. That's where the operating system started: systems beat heroics, the median is the enemy, and waste is a moral problem. Everything after — the engineering degree, the Army, the rooms with boards in them, the rack in the basement — is the same instinct, scaled.
— mike · the operator
Iowa to the rack.
— click a chapter, or scroll to scrub →Industrial engineering.
A Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering — graduated with Distinction. Where the operating system started: systems beat heroics, the median is the enemy, and waste is a moral problem. The Lean / Six Sigma Black Belt and the PMP came later — the instinct came first.
The math that makes it defensible.
— pick a primitive · real sourceDEVIATION.
— pre-order · ships Q4 2027An operator-memoir, and a manual.
312 pages on building a sovereign operating system in public — the doctrine, the engines, the patent drafts, and the discipline of shipping when no one's watching. The companion repo is open-source (MIT).
Recent writing.
— substack · bi-weeklyThe 100-day window — how I scope.
The seam between deterministic and probabilistic isn't academic. Here's how I price, scope, and ship against the 100-day window.
read on substack →Racking GPUs on residential power.
The build notes. Open-frame rails. UPS sizing math. Why the dog now sleeps through the fans.
read on substack →Why I draft patents before pitching.
If you pitch before you draft, the meeting becomes the prior art. The 30-day rule, and how to invert it.
read on substack →Two emails a month.
The 3am log of an operator running 100+ governed agents in production — AI ops, the Forge process, patent-draft claims, and the math behind the apparatus. Free baseline, paid tier for the deeper architecture write-ups.