Tristan Cravello came to tech from a middle school classroom. He spent three years teaching social studies - 6th-grade World History, 7th-grade Civics and 8th-grade U.S. History - and coaching track and field.
If you've ever taught, you'll know how that job goes. You plan a lesson, watch it fall apart in second period, and rebuild it before third. Plan, test, adjust, repeat, which as it turns out is pretty much how engineering works too.
More than 80 projects since the start of the year
Tristan joined NextWork earlier this year and has shipped more than 80 projects since. A few of his favorites come straight out of his own life. ClassPulse is a classroom behavior tracker, built by a former teacher. RunLayer recommends running apparel, and Tristan is a competitive distance runner. And threat-ingest is a production-grade pipeline built with Docker and PostgreSQL. You can open all of them in his portfolio.
Running has also taught him that consistency beats intensity, and that setbacks are just part of the course.
Teaching again, every Wednesday
Tristan's whole philosophy is that you can start before you know everything, and he has followed it himself. He co-leads a Build & Brew group, where he writes his own AI projects and teaches them every Wednesday in the NextWork Discord.
He's most drawn to where AI meets security, and you can see it in the directions he's exploring with his group: AI security scanners for CI/CD pipelines, Docker security analyzers, AI scanning for public API endpoints, and Claude Code and Gauntlet Loop-style builds.
For his group he plays a lot of roles at once - mentor, fellow builder, troubleshooter and project guide. He also judges a session the way a teacher would. To Tristan, it's a success when everyone leaves more confident than they arrived.