nathan perry

Full-time at Tailscale — details forthcoming once I clarify what can be public / if we open-source any of my contributions.

previous

I completed my Master's degree in May 2025 at the MIT Media Lab with the Responsive Environments group, where I:

• Wrote software that is on the surface of the Moon
• Researched and built networks of microcontrollers over unconventional wired links (thesis)
• Co-ran an auditory perception experiment on a zero-g flight
• Deployed a lab-mate's experimental environmental sensor devices on the Canary Islands
• Designed and fabricated a tiny 9g sensor node which can fly on kites and drones

I wrote about these projects (and more) in detail at /resenv.

Before the Media Lab, I was a firmware and software consultant in the Boston area: my work included firmware and UI now shipping on Volta Labs' biological sample prep devices. I'm an alum of Tulip Interfaces, where I built their second-generation machine monitoring backend, then helped bring up firmware and embedded Linux on their EdgeMC and EdgeIO industrial IoT gateway devices.

I completed a CS and Philosophy double-major at Williams College in 2018.

content

This blog originally started as a series of assignments for Neil Gershenfeld's how-to-make class series (see /class/{htm,machines}).

Personal projects and reflections:

• site defense

  defending my reverse proxy from very light, unintentional DoS

• embassy-sync, lock-api mutex compat
• clef

  automatic, configurable kicad project outputs with nix

• ppq [concept]

  documentary media queueing from a phone

• nix: tinysearch

  packaging site-embedded search for nix

• git web frontends

  canonical repo summary page = tree + readme

• rdap crawler monitor

  automated packet provenance for blacklisting impolite web crawlers

• home lab equipment

  list of equipment

• tourmaline [suspended]

  embedded erlang runtime in rust