Machine learning engineer.
Bird photographer.
Nail artist.

I build ML systems at Meta and spend the rest of my time with a camera or at a nail desk. This is where I keep the work that doesn't fit in a LinkedIn profile.

Photography

I've been exploring Bay Area wildlife with a camera. These are picks from a growing field archive, each one a species I wanted to get right.

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White Crowned Sparrow resting on a branch
White Crowned Sparrow Apr 2026
Great Egret standing tall
Great Egret Mar 2026
Black Crowned Night Heron
Black Crowned Night Heron Apr 2026
Acorn Woodpecker Alopecosa Amblyptilia American Avocet American Avocet American Wigeon Anise Swallowtail Anna s Hummingbird Banana slug dark Belted Kingfisher Black Billed Magpie Black Crowned Night Heron Black necked Stilt Black phoebe Botta s Pocket Gopher Bufflehead Cedar Waxwing Chyrus Common Raven Coot Crow Golden crowned Sparrow Golden Paper Wasp Great Blue Heron Great Egret House finch male Largus California Least Sandpiper Mallard Mourning Dove Northern Shoveler Nuttall s Woodpecker Potato Aphid Ring Billed Gull Ruby throated hummingbird Seven Spot Ladybird Shield backed katydid Snowy egret Song Sparrow Song sparrow Squirrel red Turkey Vulture Western Boxelder Bug Western Fence Lizard Western Gull White Crowned Sparrow Wild Turkey Willet Yellow Romped Warbler

Nail Art

I design nail sets the way I'd approach any creative problem. Start with a constraint, build a palette, and refine until every detail earns its place.

Green French tips with holly designs and a snowflake
Holly French Tips Green French tips with a festive winter accent
Light blue striped base with small fruit designs
Summer Fruit Blue stripes with orange and cherry details
Olive green nails with small red dot design
Olive Dots Olive green base with simple red accents
Soft blue polka dot French tips on a sheer nude base
Polka Dot French Powder blue dotted tips over a sheer neutral base
Baby blue press-on nails with silver chrome edging
Blue Chrome Tips Soft blue nails framed with mirrored silver edges
Sky blue nails with hand-painted fruit and floral accents
Blue Fruit Mix Sky blue set with cherries, citrus, florals, and tiny details
Muted olive and pale blue nails with simple dot accents
Olive Blue Dots Two-tone olive and powder blue set with minimal dot details
Checkered Gold Holly French Tips Silver Accents Polka Dot French Blue Chrome Tips Blue Fruit Mix Olive Blue Dots

Writing

I write about the parts of applied ML that aren't about models. Usually it's the interface, the ops, or the part where someone pastes a screenshot of JSON into a chat box.

OpenClaw content generation pipeline diagram
May 2026 · Project update

Building a Content Generation Pipeline in OpenClaw

A self-improving editorial system where packets, skills, subagents, review artifacts, and an operator loop preserve feedback instead of losing it in chat scrollback.

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Claude Code as Infrastructure cover illustration
March 2026 · Essay

Claude Code as Infrastructure

Take a customer feedback classifier. The model is usually the easy part. The hard part is the Excel paste, the Slack thread, and the screenshot of JSON. This essay compares that workflow built as a traditional Python pipeline and as a Claude Code pipeline, and shows where the real engineering tax lives.

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Earlier writing
The Challenge of Integrating LLMs into Deterministic Systems 2023 · Medium Monty Hall is Simpler Than You Think! 2021 · Medium Teaching a Language Model to Play Chess 2021 · Medium View all Medium writing Archive
Travis Barton

About

I'm Travis, a machine learning engineer at Meta based in the Bay Area. My day job is building systems that work at scale. Everything else on this site is what I do because I can't stop making things.

If any of this resonates, or if you're building something interesting, I'd love to hear from you.

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