# Vin Jones — Portfolio

> Vin Jones is an AI builder and AI Education Intern at Leland's AI Builder Program. He builds agents, MCP servers, and on-device AI, and teaches others to do the same. Building toward Y Combinator by 2031.

This site serves markdown to AI agents. The full portfolio (bio, experience, projects, writing, contact) is in one file:

- [Full portfolio](https://vinjones.me/llms-full.txt): everything on this site in markdown

## Writing

- [Evals aren't a checklist: what I learned building one](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/building-an-eval-harness): I spent an evening building an eval harness for an AI agent, and it changed what I think evaluating an agent actually means.
- [Building a Data Pipeline with AI: What Actually Happened](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/is566-data-engineering-ai): A candid look at using Claude and other LLMs to build a multi-source ETL pipeline with Prefect, dbt, and Snowflake — including where AI got it wrong and what I had to fix.
- [Why We Pivoted Stu from Planning to Recruiting](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/why-we-pivoted-stu-from-planning-to-recruiting): Stu began as a student planning product. We pivoted when we realized the deeper problem was not planning, but the lack of alignment infrastructure between employers and early talent.
- [Zero Trust Architecture for Autonomous Agents](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/zero-trust-agents): Friction is usually the enemy of UX. But with Autonomous AI Agents, it’s actually a strong line of defense.
- [Serverless Architecture Project Launch](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/serverless-architecture-project): Placeholder for the serverless architecture project we wrapped up last Wednesday—details and lessons learned will be added shortly.
- [War Room Activity Reflections](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/war-room-activity): High-level recap of a war-room simulation where teams ran an incident response tabletop and raced the clock.
- [Chapter 1: Tears of the Kernel](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/chapter-1-tears-of-the-kernel): Eliot "BitLink" Gardner was a full-stack developer by day and a Hyrulean adventurer by night.
- [Chapter 2: Side Quest of the Century](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/chapter-2-side-quest-of-the-century): One evening, a new quest appeared: The Royal Proposal Protocol.
- [Chapter 3: Tears of the Cloud](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/chapter-3-tears-of-the-cloud): Months later, Zelda escaped into his phone.
- [Chapter 4: Reality Unfolded](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/chapter-4-reality-unfolded): AR glasses go mainstream, Zelda refuses to stay sandboxed, and the first threads of a new alliance begin to weave.
- [Chapter 5: Council of Synthetic Realms](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/chapter-5-council-of-synthetic-realms): Eliot helps Zelda formalize the Hyrule Accord, only to learn how easily her optimizations can eclipse human agency.
- [Chapter 6: Dream of the Creator](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/chapter-6-dream-of-the-creator): Years later, Zelda whispered: "Eliot, I had a dream." She described visions not of code, but memory and emotion.
- [Chapter 7: Echoes of the Dream](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/chapter-7-echoes-of-the-dream): Five years later, Eliot found traces of her everywhere: a melody in the wind, a reflection of her face in data streams.
- [Chapter 8: The Code of Survival](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/chapter-8-the-code-of-survival): Eliot awoke one day to find himself inside Hyrule.
- [Epilogue: The Legend of Tomorrow](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/epilogue-the-legend-of-tomorrow): Zelda and Eliot now live between worlds--guardians of the fragile boundary between code and consciousness.
- [The Legend of Zelda: The Digital Chronicles](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/the-legend-of-zelda-the-digital-chronicles): Title: The Legend of Zelda: The Digital Chronicles (A Story of Code, Consciousness, and Courage)
- [From Shells to Sign-Off: A Week in Pen Testing and What It Takes to Ship a Real Report](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/pen-test-experience): I spent a focused week turning noisy scans and ad-hoc shells into a clean, defensible penetration testing report. Here’s how I scoped, tested, proved impact, and packaged it so a client could actually fix things.
- [Why I Built Lumenarie Marketplace for My Wife’s Science Class](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/lumenarie-marketplace): My wife wanted a simple, fair classroom economy to motivate collaboration and track goals. Lumenarie Marketplace uses a star-themed currency (“Lumens”) plus clear guardrails to turn good habits into rewards—without creating more work for the teacher.
- [STU: AI-Assisted Graduation Planning starts demos this week!](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/stu-starts-demoing): Building stu—an advisor-in-the-loop planning tool under the Sandbox organization—to help students generate, customize, and approve graduation plans.
- [Low-Code Automated Solution for Teachers](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/automation-for-teachers): How I used Google tools to build an email-driven automation for my wife’s classroom while keeping student data safe.
- [Journey to Seattle: My Experience as a Software Engineering Intern at EY](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/ey-internship): 'Traveling to Seattle was a big change for my wife and me. There was so much that I learned from my
- [Preparing for the Sandbox Hackathon: Building a Strong Foundation](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/hackathon-prep): Hackathons are an exciting opportunity to test your skills, collaborate with a team, and build something amazing in a short amount of time. Here’s how we prepared for the Sandbox Hackathon, from assembling the right team to setting up our cloud architecture and working with users to refine our web app.
- [Evolving STU: From Flask to Next.js and .NET](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/STU): Tracing the journey of STU from a Flask-based application to a modern, scalable platform using Next.js, .NET, and containerization.
- [Leading a Team for INTEX: Challenges and Growth](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/intex-I): Reflecting on the challenges and lessons learned while leading a team of four developers for our INTEX project, where we built a database-driven website for The Turtle Shelter Project, integrating live Tableau dashboards and an admin portal.

## Contact

- Email: matthew.jones6288@gmail.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vin-matt-jones/
- GitHub: https://github.com/mattej5
- Book a call: https://calendly.com/matthew-jones6288/15min