Winter Faulk

I fell in love with computers when I was 12 years old. My first machine was a Packard Bell with an Intel 386 processor and 4MB of RAM, later upgraded to a whopping 16MB. I had a habit of breaking the system repeatedly, and after my father grew tired of paying for repairs, one of his friends taught me how to fix it myself. From that moment on, I spent hours every day tinkering: breaking, fixing, and tweaking everything I could on it.

That computer was where I first learned to code in BASIC and discovered my gateway to the internet. As the years went by, I taught myself ASM86, Visual Basic, HTML, and QuakeC to build my own Quake mods. By my teenage years, I had discovered a deep interest in networking and security. After high school, I earned multiple certifications from Microsoft, Cisco, and CompTIA, laying the foundation for what has become a lifelong passion for technology.

Over the last 20+ years, I have evolved into a Strategic Technologist, moving from building network infrastructures to architecting large-scale SaaS platforms. My career has spanned Fortune 500 companies and high-growth startups. Today, I am the Lead Engineer at Handl Health, where my team builds a consumer product that lets insurance plan members see what a provider visit or procedure will cost before they go. Since I joined, I have helped grow it from a limited group of users to thousands every week.

AI is at the center of how I work. I build heavily with Cursor and Claude, and I have designed and maintained an AI-driven process for assessing and approving pull requests, along with custom healthcare AI chatbots. It is all part of my broader commitment to bridging the gap between complex backend logic and seamless user experiences.

Whether I am scaling an organization, like helping PlexTrac grow by 600%, or growing a product's user base week over week, my goal remains the same: building scalable, high-integrity systems. My work centers on Node.js and TypeScript, with Deno, Rust, and AI rounding out my toolkit. I continue to explore the boundaries of self-hosted infrastructure and AI-assisted development.

Technology has never been just a career for me; it is an ongoing journey of breaking, building, and evolving.