Sean Fitzgerald spent 32 years as a paramedic. These days he's a self-taught developer and AI hobbyist in Houston, Texas, and you can count on him to be building something new almost every week.
The list of what he's built so far runs in a lot of directions at once: a social media platform, algorithmic trading bots, a logistics lead scraper, a TikTok automation tool, a RAG system for government contracts, an NFT platform, an AI teaching assistant system, a browser-based chatbot, and his own personal JARVIS, inspired by Iron Man.
The missing 20%
Sean builds almost everything with AI, and he still wants to understand what he's building. An AI answer will take you a long way, but on its own it doesn't give you the technical context, the structure or the practical learning that sits behind it. Sean calls that gap the "missing 20%" - and NextWork projects are how he fills it.
A weekly table in Houston
Sean is now a NextWork Build & Brew master, and his group meets in person every week. You'll often find him at his favorite 24/7 workspace with a coffee, demoing his latest project to the crew.
The crew includes a physician, graduate students, an Uber driver, high school students and career changers - a group with very little in common on paper apart from showing up to build together. They've been meeting for more than six weeks now, often for two to three hours at a time, and they've already completed two hackathons together. If you're in Houston and want a seat at that table, Sean's Build & Brew group is open.
Sean, thank you for bringing a physician, an Uber driver and a room full of students to the same table every week, and for reminding everyone around it that the missing 20% is worth learning properly.