About

I'm Hamilton Turner. I have a Ph.D. in computer engineering from Virginia Tech, I teach graduate distributed systems at Vanderbilt as an adjunct, and I've been the CTO of three companies: a mobile-security firm, an encrypted-communications company, and a digital-identity startup. The throughline is the same one that shows up in everything here — taking a hard technical problem and turning it into something a team can actually ship.

These days I run 522 Software, a one-person shop where I do that work on a fractional basis: interim and part-time CTO engagements, technical diligence on M&A deals, and the kind of architecture and strategy calls that are easier to get right with someone who's already made the expensive version of the mistake.

What this blog is

The day job is high-touch and confidential; most of the interesting work never makes it to a case study. This blog is the other half — the in-the-weeds version. Applied AI and agentic systems are where most of my attention is right now, so that's where most of the writing starts, but I follow the thread wherever the actual engineering goes.

Mostly it's the unglamorous middle — what I actually ran, what it cost, and what broke. Real numbers and real configs, including the ones that made me look stupid.

I write these with AI in the loop and say so plainly: the insights and judgment are mine, the prose often gets a polish from Claude, and on the AI-systems posts Claude is genuinely a co-author because it helped do the work being described. If a post ever reads like a model wrote it unattended, that's a bug — tell me.

Working together

If you're a founder or an investor sizing up a technical decision — a hire you can't yet justify full-time, a codebase you're about to buy, an architecture you're not sure will survive contact with scale — that's the kind of thing I do. The lowest-friction way to start a conversation is LinkedIn or the contact details at 522software.com. No pitch, just a conversation.