---
layout: ../layouts/Base.astro
title: Work · Jesse Anderson
description: The work that shipped. ADA Handles, HAL, K.O.R.A., clicked.bio, Remindsly 
slug: work
navLabel: Work
navOrder: 1
summary: ADA Handles, HAL, K.O.R.A., PapaGoose, prior chapters
---

<main class="work">

  <header class="page-header">
    <p class="eyebrow">My work</p>
    <h1>
        The work that <span class="accent">shipped</span>. 
    </h1>
    <span class="accent">Cardano</span> - ADA Handles, H.A.L., and K.O.R.A.<br />
    <span class="accent">PapaGoose LLC</span> - clicked.bio and Remindsly
  </header>

<Project eyebrow="ADA Handles" title="Custom wallet addresses secured on Cardano." featured={true}>

<span class="accent">Co-founded</span> with my second-eldest son in 2021. I run platform engineering and the AI ops layer.

<ProjectStats stats={[
    ['265K+', 'address-resolution NFTs'],
    ['70K+', 'wallets resolved'],
    ['10K', 'NFT collection with updateable mint/edit'],
    ['All', 'major Cardano wallets adopted']
]} />

The platform is a constellation of services across the [github.com/koralabs](https://github.com/koralabs) namespace. The work in impact terms:

- **Converted to completely <span class="accent">decentralized minting</span>.** Anyone can mint or edit a handle on-chain within the contract's rules. Every major Cardano wallet adopted the new policy.
- **<span class="accent">Contracts that upgrade</span> in place.** The "withdraw 0" / observer trick. Cardano lets you replace a contract's logic without moving the locked UTxOs anywhere new, if you set it up right. We worked out the technique against live state. It's the reason our cutover doesn't need a state migration or chain downtime.
- **<span class="accent">NFT-based OAuth</span> where the identity is your handle.** Hold the NFT, sign in to anything that speaks OAuth. Web2 SSO ergonomics on a self-custody wallet, no custodian holding your keys.
- **<span class="accent">Merkle Patricia Tries</span> inside on-chain code.** Ported the structure into Aiken so contracts can prove membership in a dataset that's far too big to store on chain.
- **Browserless <span class="accent">dynamic SVG rendering</span> at scale.** Every handle's NFT image is typographic SVG generated server-side. Hundreds of thousands of unique renders across reissues and personalization.
- **<span class="accent">Serverless Cardano Node</span> on AWS Fargate.** We ran the node, Ogmios, and the Handles API on Fargate plus EFS, picking up redundancy, failover, auto-scaling, and reproducible deployment. The trick that made it work: cross-host node-socket connectivity, solved with `socat` bridging a Unix domain socket to TCP. 
- **<span class="accent">On-chain IPFS content validation.</span>** A Cardano smart contract validates the contents of an IPFS file by matching the CIDv1 embedded hash against bytes supplied in the redeemer. Around the 1KB to 12KB sweet spot for content size. Used live for personalization.
- **Discord as a <span class="accent">production control plane</span>.** Tickets land there. Deploys go through there. Alerts wake people up there. I built the bot, the CloudWatch alerting pipeline, and the deploy automation that operators trigger from chat threads. The autonomous-agent layer on top of all this is K.O.R.A.
- **Two parallel cutovers - contract language and transaction tooling** Smart contracts moving to <span class="accent">Aiken</span>: DeMi and SubHandles are there, Personalization next. The TX-building library moved to `@cardano-sdk/*`.
- **[marketplace.handle.me](https://marketplace.handle.me)** handles secondary trading on-chain. 
- **[chat.handle.me](https://chat.handle.me)** runs direct messaging keyed to handle identity. 
- **[secrets.handle.me](https://secrets.handle.me)** is research-stage, looking at account recovery via social trust graphs. 
- **[merch.handle.me](https://merch.handle.me)** and [metaverse.handle.me](https://metaverse.handle.me) are announced and in flight.

<ImagePlaceholder 
    src='/images/handles_ecosystem.png'
    alt='ADA Handles - address resolution on Cardano'
    note='ADA Handles - address resolution on Cardano' 
/>

</Project>

<Project eyebrow="H.A.L. - Handle Augmented Lifeform" title="One of the best minting experiences on Cardano." featured={true}>

A second product line, built on the on-chain primitives Handles introduced. We expose it as an SDK, a minting engine, and 3D-asset support, so other Cardano teams can ship NFT collections without rebuilding the contracts and orchestration we already worked through.

<ProjectStats stats={[
    ['~4K', 'transactions chained in a single run'],
    ['70K+', 'tokens minted'],
    ['8+', 'scripts and ref inputs per tx'],
    ['100%', 'deterministic settlement']
]} />
- <span class="accent">5 ASSETS!</span> - each H.A.L. mint comes with four additional assets (five total assets per mint)<br />
- <span class="accent">100 $0 LEGENDARY Handle raffle tickets</span> - randomly selected during the mint<br />
- <span class="accent">100% 3D</span> - each H.A.L. is a 100% 3D asset, equipped with multiple 3D assets, all identified in the datum. The 2D image is a direct Blender render of the 3D H.A.L.<br />
- <span class="accent">FOURTEEN 1-OF-1s</span> -  14 available legendary 1-of-1s (24 total including KOLs and Founders)<br />
- <span class="accent">Virtual SubHandle Tracking!</span><br />
&nbsp;&nbsp;- Each H.A.L. gets a <span class="accent">free Virtual SubHandle</span> in the format of $designation@hal that tracks the address of your H.A.L.<br />
&nbsp;&nbsp;- <span class="accent">Two years</span> of Virtual SubHandle subscription costs are covered up-front, after which there is no obligation to continue to use it.<br />
- <span class="accent">Unity & Unreal Engine</span> FBX Files and Web GLB files<br />
- $handle ecosystem benefits (<span class="accent">discounts, early/final access</span>, etc)<br />
- CIP-68 <span class="accent">3D Personalization</span><br />
- <span class="accent">13 project collaboration</span> (whitelists, custom assets, and a few 1-of-1s)<br />
- OG and 2-character Handle <span class="accent">whitelist</span>, and ~1000 project giveaway whitelist spots.<br />
- <span class="accent">Expansive lore</span> with factions, battles, ranking, etc<br />
- Royalties greater than 2.5% (for the original artist) go to a <span class="accent">H.A.L. community treasury</span>. High royalties during mint and before staking mechanism is live.<br />
- A truly unique, <span class="accent">first of it's kind</span>, DECENTRALIZED MINTING experience. All 10K H.A.L.s are minted through smart contracts that also control uniqueness and whitelists. All to be OPEN-SOURCED after launch.<br />

<ImagePlaceholder 
    src='/images/hal_minting_experience.png'
    alt='H.A.L. - Best Cardano mint experience'
    note='H.A.L. - Best Cardano mint experience'
/>
</Project>

<Project eyebrow="K.O.R.A." title="Knowledge and Operations Response Assistant">

<ProjectStats stats={[
    ['13', 'executor job types'],
    ['10', 'self-monitored heartbeats'],
    ['30', 'monitored repositories'],
    ['16', 'monitored Discord channels']
]} />

A multi-component, <span class="accent">autonomous, self-repair agent</span> running day-to-day ops for the Handles ecosystem interfacing via Discord. 
She triages tickets, moderates, monitors, responds to alerts, orchestrates deployments, and synthesizes knowledge from the ecosystem history.

The pipeline is a chat gate into an AI provider into an executor into a worker. 

She tests herself in three layers: hermetic with mocks, real-process against test services, <span class="accent">live-canary on real data</span> with no side effects. 
Nothing ships green-by-inference.

She uses <span class="accent">Discord as the operator UI</span> on purpose. Pinned messages contain the agent's current settings. 
Operators can use plain language to flip toggles ("turn chat responses off") or turn knobs ("increase GIF responses to 40%").
Alerts post to operator channels with enough metadata for K.O.R.A. to triage them. When someone types "deploy to mainnet" or "troubleshoot this ticket," 
K.O.R.A. actually does the deploy or looks into the ticket.

<ImagePlaceholder
    src='/images/kora_handles_ecosystem.png'
    alt='K.O.R.A. - autonomous self-repair agent for the Handles ecosystem'
    note='K.O.R.A. - autonomous self-repair agent for the Handles ecosystem'
/>

</Project>

<Project eyebrow="PapaGoose LLC" title="My latest company.">

Two AI-driven products. [clicked.bio](https://clicked.bio) is an AI-driven links and posts platform for content creators and the agencies that manage them. [Remindsly](https://remindsly.com) is an AI-driven reminder system that keeps after you until the task gets done.

</Project>

<PriorWork lede="Earlier engineering at scale, before Kora Labs and PapaGoose.">

### <span class="accent">Capital One, Master Platform Engineer, 2018 to 2022</span>

I designed an autoscaled serverless Fargate platform that streamed 25,000 synthetic Kafka records per second from our ML team's synthetic data models. 
Day-to-day I owned vulnerability monitoring and threat scoring across our team's systems.

### <span class="accent">Xero, Senior SWE and DevOps, 2013 to 2018</span>

Five years and roughly a hundred two-week sprints on a 2-million-user SaaS accounting and payroll platform. 
I built the contextual auto-complete search: two million indexed objects on AWS ElasticSearch, queried dozens of times per second.

</PriorWork>

</main>
