--- title: "About Nathan Gamache | Lead developer and CS student" description: "CS (AI) student at Lawrence Tech, lead developer at Perfect Afternoon and founder of Gamache Technology Solutions: WordPress, AI tools, ML and a homelab." url: https://www.nathangamache.com/about/ --- # Hi, I’m Nathan I’m a CS student at Lawrence Tech and I run a small web dev shop called Gamache Technology Solutions. I’m also lead developer at Perfect Afternoon. Most of my paid work is WordPress and WooCommerce, and outside of that I spend a lot of time on ML research and keeping my homelab alive. ## Where I work **Perfect Afternoon.** I joined the agency in June 2022 as a WordPress developer and became lead developer in March 2026. I work hybrid, full time in the summers and part time while school is in session. It’s client work: WooCommerce stores, corporate sites and franchise location pages. A project there usually has a project manager, who also runs QA, and a developer, and sometimes a designer or a marketer. On mine I own the development and the deployment, and our monthly audits keep watch on each site after launch. Across the agency that’s 260+ websites for 100+ clients on 10+ servers. A few of those projects are written up: [Corrigan Companies](https://www.nathangamache.com/projects/corrigan/), [Terminal Supply Co](https://www.nathangamache.com/projects/terminal-supply/) and [Cottage Inn](https://www.nathangamache.com/projects/cottage-inn/). As lead developer I have focused on taking manual work off the team, most of all with [PANoodle](https://www.nathangamache.com/projects/panoodle/), the AI operations platform I invented and built. **Gamache Technology Solutions.** My own company, an LLC I founded in February 2024. The main client so far is SJD Taxi, where I turned an unfinished replacement for their 2015 booking system into a working one, work I split between my shop and Perfect Afternoon. [That one has a full case study](https://www.nathangamache.com/projects/sjd-taxi/). I also co-founded [CatalogXpert](https://www.nathangamache.com/projects/catalogxpert/) in March 2026 as a venture between Gamache Technology Solutions and JDW Ventures. I wrote its original demo and first sales engine, and the specs its AI sales assistant platform was built from. - Based in: **Michigan, USA** - Studying: **Computer Science (AI), Lawrence Tech** - Graduating: **December 2026** - Working at: **Perfect Afternoon** - Running: **Gamache Technology Solutions** ![Nathan Gamache, smiling, in a navy sweater over a collared shirt](https://www.nathangamache.com/assets/img/nathan-gamache.webp) Most of my hours ## Web development This is where I spend most of my hours. I build and maintain WooCommerce stores for real businesses, which means the work is less “pretty landing page” and more “why is the cart total wrong when someone adds a bundle with a variable product on sale.” A lot of it is debugging: tracking down a dead PayPal script that’s killing bundle JS, figuring out why UPS is returning weird shipping rates, fixing template overrides that haven’t been updated in four major WooCommerce versions. The stuff I build from scratch tends to be: - Custom plugins for specific client workflows (HubSpot sync, dynamic product filters, kit/bundle logic) - ACF-powered Gutenberg blocks that editors can actually use without breaking the layout - Performance work: caching, deferred CSS, font loading, cleaning up JS that’s blocking render - Integrations with third-party services (shipping, inventory, CRM, payment) I care a lot about leaving sites in better shape than I found them. Most WordPress codebases I inherit have accumulated years of “temporary” fixes, and part of the job is quietly undoing that without breaking anything in production. Research ## Machine learning My senior project, which I finished in May 2026, was on violence anticipation in video: predicting risk before something happens rather than classifying it after the fact. During the capstone I worked with XD-Violence and UCF-Crime, transformer-based architectures and streaming evaluation metrics, since most benchmarks assume you have the whole clip, which defeats the point. In October 2026 I rebuilt the benchmark and the evaluation from scratch, with a baseline that sees no video at all, and the first results that beat it came out of that. [More on the capstone](https://www.nathangamache.com/projects/capstone/). For my Machine Learning class I co-wrote an unpublished paper on process and outcome reward modeling for reasoning in small language models, using a larger teacher model to train 1.5B-parameter reward models. Mostly it taught me how finicky reward modeling is and how much variance there is between runs. [More on the paper](https://www.nathangamache.com/projects/reward-models/). For my Deep Learning class at Lawrence Tech in spring 2026 I built Detroit Pulse on my own. It turns public scanner radio for metro Detroit into a live incident map: Whisper transcribes the audio, a local Qwen2.5-7B model reads each transmission for its address and the kind of call, and a correlation engine groups transmissions into incidents. I also built a QLoRA pipeline for the address step, trained a LoRA adapter with it and ran the fine-tuned model in Detroit Pulse. [More on Detroit Pulse](https://www.nathangamache.com/projects/detroit-pulse/). What I actually enjoy is the full pipeline: dataset handling, training loops, evaluation design, and thinking about what it takes to run any of this in production with real latency constraints. Systems ## Homelab and systems I run three servers in a rack at home, on two UPSs: a web server, a game server for friends and a NAS. Backups run every day. This website runs from the rack, and so does the vacation app I built for my family. It’s a low-stakes way to practice the infra stuff I don’t get to do much in WordPress land: Linux administration, networking, automation and keeping services up without babysitting them. [More on the homelab](https://www.nathangamache.com/projects/homelab/). ## Tech I use What I use day to day. ### Web Technologies: PHP, JavaScript, TypeScript, WordPress, WooCommerce, ACF, Gutenberg, REST APIs, SQL, WP Rocket, Cloudflare ### Machine learning Technologies: Python, PyTorch, NumPy, Pandas, Transformers, QLoRA, Whisper, Video and data pipelines ### AI apps and data Technologies: Claude, MCP, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Redis, Chroma, React ### Infrastructure Technologies: Linux, Nginx, Apache, Cloudflare, cron, rsync, Docker Next ## What I’m working on improving - **Cleaner architectures without overengineering.** It’s easy to reach for patterns that don’t pay off at the scale I actually work at. - **Getting ML models out of notebooks** and into things that run fast and reliably in production. - **Systems fundamentals:** networking, observability, and deployments that aren’t scary. ## Say hi Email is the quickest way to reach me. [nathanpaulgamache@gmail.com](mailto:nathanpaulgamache@gmail.com) [Or use the contact form](https://www.nathangamache.com/contact/) --- Nathan Gamache · [nathanpaulgamache@gmail.com](mailto:nathanpaulgamache@gmail.com) · [GitHub](https://github.com/nathangamache) · [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathan-p-gamache/) · [nathangamache.com](https://www.nathangamache.com/)