William Duren

I'm a software engineer and builder. For most of the last decade, I've worked as a technical lead on systems that monitor mini-grids in energy access contexts — small electrical networks serving communities that aren't reliably connected to a national grid. The work is half software, half field reality, and it leaves a strong impression.

I write here because a lot of what I've learned is practical, hard to find documented anywhere, and easy to lose between projects. Some of it is specific to mini-grids and the strange constraints of running monitoring infrastructure where the power, the network, and the equipment can all fail in the same week. Some of it is just engineering — the kind that's worth writing down so someone (often future me) doesn't have to learn it twice.

Outside of energy work, I build personal software. Music analysis, health tracking, home monitoring — projects that are useful to me, interesting to document, and unbothered about whether they ever scale. I'm also drawn to the slow, careful application of LLMs and agentic tooling to real problems, and skeptical of most of the loud parts.