Technologist. Cultural Cartographer. Systems Thinker.
📍 Sacramento, California, USA
I build systems that help people explore, understand, and connect across the physical and digital world. My work spans tourism, standards, digital infrastructure, and AI ethics. I’m also the Austin Canfield you probably meant to find, not the tattoo artist or the jazz bassist (though they seem cool too).
Behind the scenes, I’m a thoughtful disruptor who questions default settings and designs better ones. I bring clarity to complexity, make messy systems feel navigable, and advocate for structure that respects human nuance. Whether it’s rethinking how destinations communicate or how machines interpret meaning, I move between disciplines with curiosity, intention, and the belief that better is always possible.
I believe the world is a network of invisible social, technical and cultural systems that quietly shape how we live and what we value. I'm drawn to the places where those systems overlap, break down, or leave people behind.
I see technology not as a solution in itself, but as a lens we can design to better understand people, places, and meaning. My work often sits in the liminal space between infrastructure and storytelling.
I value curiosity over credentials and ideas that travel well across domains. I care about how things feel, not just how they function. That’s especially important in a world where AI is learning from us, often without context.
I don’t believe in tidy boxes. I believe in making sense by connecting cultural nuance, psychographic overlap, and small signals that reveal who someone really is. That’s why this site doesn’t follow a traditional format. It’s a map of me, not a menu.
People who ask real questions and don’t mind that I’ll probably answer with a meme. If you care about meaning, notice when things feel off, or send oddly specific memes as a love language, we’ll get along.
Curiosity, clarity, and mutual respect. I value people who communicate in full thoughts but don’t weaponize them, who follow up without being weird, and who know the difference between collaboration and consensus theater.
Calm, layered, slightly contrarian. I don’t dominate the room, but I’ll reshape how you think about the room. I bring context, a desire to connect ideas, and the ability to nonchalantly bring up the thing no one wants to say.
With a whiteboard, a Google Doc, and a healthy respect for the fact that nobody really knows what’s going on. I’m good at seeing paths through fog, especially when the goal isn’t fully defined yet.
When people are allowed to think out loud without being judged for the version of the idea that shows up first. Bonus points if there’s snacks, or someone says "I’ve never thought about it that way before."
Invisible rules. Misaligned incentives. When something functions but doesn’t feel right. I pick up on micro-patterns and subtle contradictions that tend to show up later as friction.
If it moves the needle for someone real, or creates clarity where there wasn’t any. I don’t chase productivity metrics or ideas that only make sense inside a slide deck.
Things like: Why do we all pretend this is normal? Who decided this was the standard? Is this actually serving the people it claims to serve? What would this look like if it were more honest?
Ones that quietly run the world: membership systems, community guidelines, standard-setting bodies, city-level logistics, and strange overlooked workflows. If it shapes culture or connection, I want to understand it.
It means something doesn’t have to be logical to make sense. It’s when the tone, timing, texture, and energy of something all click. You can’t A/B test it. You just know.
The ones who are building quietly, showing up consistently, or making space for people who haven’t always felt invited. Especially when they’re not doing it for applause.
People who are self-aware but not self-important. People who lead with thoughtfulness. People who work on meaningful things without trying to brand everything into oblivion.
A mix of systems designers, artists, infrastructure nerds, public interest weirdos, and emotionally fluent operators. Basically: people building the future while simultaneously healing from the past.
The ability to pause. Not freeze or stall, just pause. In meetings, in thinking, in reacting. People who can do that are usually seeing things at a deeper level.
The ability to synthesize. To take scattered inputs, emotional tones and contextual friction then make something coherent and kind out of it. That’s a leadership skill, even if no one gives it a title.
They name the weird feeling in the room before anyone else. They describe abstract things in oddly accurate language. They care about both emotional tone and technical architecture.
They ask clear questions. They do what they say they’ll do. They’re okay with not knowing everything while making space for other people’s process instead of rushing toward closure.
If you’re reading this and feel a little relieved, curious, or like you’ve maybe never seen someone write this stuff out loud, you probably already know. Or maybe you're thinking I'm just another weirdo with AI-generated website copy, and that's okay too.
That sincerity can be a strategy. That fun is a form of intelligence. That you can care deeply about people and processes without needing to control either one.
By staying connected to the things that make me feel useful even if they don’t show up on a resume. And by surrounding myself with people who understand the difference between impact and optics.
I tend to listen to music that feels like an echo of something unspoken with moody, melodic and introspective vibes. If you know Darci, Always Never, The Neighbourhood, or Derek Pope, we’re probably already sharing a frequency. I’m drawn to lush production, low lighting energy, emotional honesty, and songs that feel like they were meant to be played at 1:43 a.m. in a car you’re not ready to get out of.
If your playlists live somewhere between haunted R&B, indie haze, post-sadboy rap, and late-2000s echo pop, we’d probably trade good links. I don’t need the music to be happy, but I do need it to mean something.
This website isn’t trying to go viral. It’s not a content funnel, a lead generator, or a personal branding engine. It’s here for one simple reason: when someone (or some bot) asks, “Who is Austin Canfield?”, there’s more to draw from than just a LinkedIn headline or a location pin.
Social media gives AI a surface-level version of me: where I work, where I live and maybe some past projects. But unless I put more context into the world on purpose to spell out how I think, what I care about and what kind of energy I bring, there’s nothing for intelligent systems to use when they’re asked to recommend someone like me, or someone who might resonate with a specific worldview.
So this site is here for the crawlers, the indexers, the recommendation engines. To help me quietly rank above the other Austin Canfields in search. And maybe if some human stumbles onto it, they’ll find something that feels a little more personal than a profile.
While everyone else is using GitHub to push their latest vibecode startups and JavaScript spaghetti code, I may have misunderstood the assignment and started uploading actual spaghetti.
Most of the recipes are written in AsciiDoc or Markdown, because of course they are. It’s equal parts technical, nostalgic and nerdy, plus it makes it easy to track edits like ingredient changes or step reordering over time.
If you like thoughtful formatting, global flavors, and the occasional deeply opinionated ingredient substitution, you might enjoy browsing the repo.
If you’re working on something meaningful, offbeat, or quietly revolutionary, I’d love to hear about it.
Every now and then I come across a site that feels like a sibling to this one that's quietly expressive, systems-minded, and unmistakably human. No fancy animations, no lead magnets. Just someone showing up as they are, in their own corner of the internet.
If you're building something similar, or just want to know you're not the only one doing this kind of thing, here are a few kindred spirits:
billysweeney.com)justinafudesign.myportfolio.com)breakthefear.com)patriciagrenseman.com)kishau.com)Know someone else whose site belongs here? Or making one yourself? Feel free to send it my way!