Selected work
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01
Nippon 26 Redux
Ride the lightning. Back to Japan, and back to the photo gallery: 35 frames, nothing else on the page. It's built on Focal Point, my own minimal gallery template. Drop JPGs into a folder and a script compresses and resizes them with ImageMagick, then writes them into the page with alt text. Deploy and done.
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02
Nippon 26
A coming-of-age vacation. Me and the kiddo, a city of 37 million people, a whole lot of anime, and Chiikawa Park. Shot on a mix of Fuji and Sony cameras.
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03
StackOverlord
A martech stack builder. Pick a product type (B2C app, PLG SaaS, ecommerce, mobile game and more), a growth stage, whether you need EU data residency, and how much you care about cost. It then recommends a stack across analytics, messaging, monetisation, CDP, error monitoring and CMS, and prices it. Every layer is swappable. Prices are hand-modelled estimates with a last-verified date for each tool, and a script flags vendor pricing pages that have changed so the numbers don't quietly go stale. Vanilla HTML, CSS and JS, no build step.
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04
Happy Hour Club
Sydney's members club for going out, and the morning after. Members join free and pay member prices for drinks at 70+ bars across Bondi, the CBD and beyond. I built the 2.0 platform. The member app, live on the App Store, shows what's on today and nearby, maps every venue and holds an Apple Wallet membership card. Venues get a self-serve portal where they apply and then manage their deal, team and billing. An admin dashboard approves venues and sends push notifications. Expo, Next.js and Supabase, with the marketing site ported off Squarespace.
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05
Figma MCP Loop
The bottleneck in Figma-to-code isn't generation anymore. It's verification. This is a closed loop: Figma MCP brings the design in, Claude Code writes the HTML and CSS, headless Chrome renders it, and a pixel diff against the original frame reports exactly what's off. That report feeds the next pass. The worked example rebuilds the Positivus landing page to a 99.5% match, with zero JS dependencies. It also caught three bugs along the way. Comes with a handoff template telling designers how to prepare files for the loop.
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06
SailCode
View. Understand. Sail better. SailCode is a sailing app for junior racing squads. The phone in each sailor's lifejacket records every session with high-precision GPS. Back on shore, the coach replays the whole squad on one map, aligned to GPS time, so the debrief runs off what actually happened on the water, not memory. Coaches pin marks from the RIB as they're laid. Sailors keep Golden Settings (rig and trim numbers for each wind range) and a two-minute post-sail Saillog. It's private by default, with parental consent for under-age sailors. The Expo app is live on the App Store, backed by a Next.js live map, an ingest API and Supabase.
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07
Meet Calc
How much is this meeting costing? Add between two and eleven people, set an hourly rate for each, and hit start. A live counter tallies the damage second by second. Get to the point. You're welcome. (Try picking eleven.)
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08
Triple Treat
I made a dictionary. You're welcome. It blends four sources: a public-domain English word list, the Urban Dictionary dataset (1999–2016, all 1.9 GB of it), IKEA product names, and brand names. Each source is filtered down to long, weird, memorable words. The result is 160,287 unique words, 99.2% of them eleven characters or longer. Good for passphrases, naming things and creative prompts.
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09
Weird TV
Back in the day I curated a lot of images on Tumblr. I wanted to grab them all before something happens. A Python script pulled the whole archive down through the Tumblr API. A Next.js front end plays it back like a television tuned to nowhere, with a new image every 900 milliseconds over a psychedelic ambient background. Digital preservation, but make it channel-surfing.
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10
As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt. 2
What would it cost to buy every single vinyl record needed to play 2ManyDJs' 2003 mix? That's 45 tracks. Headless Chrome screenshots each Discogs release page, GPT-4 Vision reads the median price off the screenshot, and the totals are converted across AUD, USD, EUR and GBP. It's built to refresh daily. The front end recreates the original CD cover, with the tracklist on the left and the photo on the right.
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11
Citation City
My idea of fun is probably not yours. Citation City takes podcast episodes from shows like The Rewatchables, The Big Picture, Bandsplain and 60 Songs That Explain the 90s. It transcribes them with Amazon Transcribe, then has Gemini 2.5 Flash pull out every named entity, debate, deep dive and funny moment. Everything is embedded into Supabase with pgvector, so you can search it semantically in a terminal-style interface. It's the whole RAG pipeline, pointed at Die Hard With A Vengeance and Dodgeball.
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12
correct horse battery staple
A curated collection of password art, inspired by XKCD's famous comic about password strength. Each piece starts as four random words plus an art style, fed to Midjourney. One example is "bräda transaction cladocarpous banallergies in the style of retro". The point is to show how even the most mundane passwords can become beautiful works of art. You're welcome.
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13
The Nihon Files
Eats, drinks, fashion, culture and hangs in Tokyo and beyond. It's a personal, curated map of restaurants, bars, cafés, shops and sights. It started as a Google Maps saved-places export and was enriched with photos and websites from the Google Places API. It's mostly Tokyo and Kyoto, but it has since wandered off to Paris, Amsterdam and New York. Built with Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind and Neon Postgres, with Python doing the data wrangling.
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14
So Bored
An important song and an experiment to see if 2017 code still holds up. Press play and Wavves' "So Bored" kicks in while the lyrics sit on a background that flips through eighteen colours, one every second. It's powered by jQuery 1.8, Modernizr and FitText, exactly as nature intended. Wasting time since forever.
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15
Guswood
My boy Angus hit the 40. Good times. A photo page for the occasion: pizza, a wheelbarrow, a lost trolley and the boyz. Some things just deserve a URL.
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16
Joker
I found a bag of CDs, and along came JOK-011-A. It's an unapologetic soundboard recording of a Nirvana show in Del Mar, California, released on Joker, the budget label of an Australian outfit that made unauthorised live CDs. So I ripped it, ran an ffmpeg conversion and wrote some code. Twelve tracks, from Drain You to Territorial Pissings.
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17
Nippon Files
A whole bunch of fun in the land of the Rising Sun. I lived in Japan from 1996 to 1998: two seasons in Hakuba, then a five-month speed run in Tokyo. I shot all of it on disposable cameras, including a 3D one that was pretty experimental at the time, and somehow held onto the negatives. Finally got them scanned. Around 160 frames. Relics from the past.
About
Arturo Escartin
Founder, creative technologist, agentic programmer, coach
I set up a Hotmail account at a café in Aoyama, Tokyo in 1998. That's probably when I knew the internet was going to be interesting.
I've spent the last 25 years building at the intersection of technology and creativity — from writing code to running a 70-person agency. These days my focus is applied AI: not just integrating LLMs, but building the infrastructure, data pipelines, and product logic that makes AI actually useful in production. I work across the full stack — model selection, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, AI orchestration, and the front-end systems that make it legible to users.
Right now I'm building SailCode, a sailing app that turns the GPS track from a phone in a lifejacket into a whole-squad debrief for junior racers, and RollMap, the BJJ coaching platform I co-founded. I also built the 2.0 platform behind Happy Hour Club, Sydney's members club for going out, and I keep shipping smaller things like StackOverlord, Figma MCP Loop and Focal Point. Creative technology is the thread that runs through all of it — the belief that the most interesting work happens when engineering rigour meets cultural intelligence.
In 2026 Anthropic gave me a US$30,000 grant in Claude credits.
The rest is yours.
Before technology, I spent 12 years in professional kitchens — Bilsons, Cicada, The Pier — running brigades of up to 50 people at service. Hospitality taught me operations, people, and how to make decisions fast when everything is on fire. Those skills translate more than you'd think. I founded and led Present Company from inception to 70+ staff.
When I'm not building things I'm learning to paint — currently working my way through the Graffiti Tunnel at USYD. Turns out a blank wall and a blank canvas aren't that different.
I get technical. I get creative. I get people.
Let's talk
Building something with AI, data or a bit of culture in it? I'd love to hear about it.
nowwhat@wotnow.com.au