Hey! Hey!

It's CK.

CK

AI Platform Specialist. Renaissance Craftsman.
Building intellectual sovereignty in the AI age.

New Jersey · Renaissance Thinking for the AI Age

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About

The short version, and the honest one.

I'm CK. By day, I help enterprise customers navigate complex AI platforms. By night, I'm reading Seneca, building self-hosted infrastructure on Linux, learning to draw from classical casts, and 3D printing things for the apartment. On Sunday, I'm probably in a pew somewhere trying to figure out how faith, philosophy, and an 800-year-old apprenticeship model all point in the same direction.

I call this the Renaissance Craftsman approach. Not because I'm trying to be Leonardo da Vinci. Because I genuinely believe that the best ideas come from connecting things that aren't supposed to be connected. Henry Chapman Mercer built an entire castle by hand to preserve craft traditions he saw disappearing. That impulse, to protect what matters by building something with your hands, is the same one driving this whole project.

I'm not a productivity influencer. I'm not optimizing my morning routine. I'm a first-generation Filipino-American who got obsessed with too many things, spent years thinking that was a problem, and eventually realized it was the whole point.

More about me →
The Studiolo — CK writing at his desk
350+
Books Collected
50+
Domains Explored
52
Skills (In Progress)
8
Devices in the Lab

"Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake."

Richard Sennett, The Craftsman

Currently

What I'm building, learning, or making right now.

It's CK — YouTube
Content Creation
Filming the 52 Skills comeback arc. Currently producing philosophy and skill videos documenting what I've been learning and building over the past year. Comeback season.
AI Courses Deep Dive
Learning + Video
Taking every free course from Anthropic Academy and Google AI. Expanding from conversational AI usage into API, automation, and agentic workflows.
3D Printing
Physical Fabrication
Learning parametric CAD in FreeCAD alongside the Bambu Lab P2S. Exploring magnetic builds, functional design, and the bridge between digital modeling and physical objects.
Academic Drawing
Classical Art
Cast drawing to life drawing progression. Learning to see before learning to render. Pencil on paper, classical tradition, no shortcuts.
Personal Website v2
You're Looking At It
Hugo rebuild. No templates, no CMS, no monthly subscription. Just markdown, a GitHub repo, and a color palette that means something.
Up next
Self-Hosted Photo Library (Immich)
Infrastructure
Cloud Backup (Backblaze B2)
Infrastructure
Homelab Expansion
Infrastructure

The Renaissance Catalog

The domains I explore and how they connect.

I don't believe in specializing in one thing. I believe in going deep across many things and finding the patterns between them. The number is the goal. Not the timeline.

AI & Knowledge Systems
Core Domain
Self-Hosted Infrastructure
Core Domain
Photography & Videography
Core Domain
Making & Fabrication
Core Domain
Classical Drawing
Active Study
Philosophy & Literature
Ongoing
Gaming & Challenge Runs
Creative Outlet
Faith & Theology
Foundation
Explore the full catalog →

The Scriptorium

A three-layer system for thinking, creating, and learning.

I

Scholar's Manuscript

Analog notebooks. Kokuyo Systemic cover with three Midori MD inserts. The hand thinks differently than the keyboard.

II

Scholar's Brain

AI collaboration as cognitive extension. Claude for deep synthesis. Gemini for real-time research. Neither one the author.

III

Scholar's Web

An Obsidian vault with 500+ notes. The permanent record of everything that survives the other two layers. Local-first, markdown-based.

"There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens."

Ecclesiastes 3:1

Writing

Thinking out loud, on purpose.

March 27, 2026
On personal websites, intellectual sovereignty, and why I didn't just use Squarespace.
All writing →