Machine learning engineer.
Bird photographer.
Nail artist.

I work on Gemini Enterprise at Google 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 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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Grey Heron
Grey Heron Nov 2026
Ricaniid Planthopper
Ricaniid Planthopper Nov 2026
Black Bear (cub)
Black Bear (cub) Sep 2026
Coatimundi
Coatimundi Jun 2026
Acorn Woodpecker Alopecosa Amblyptilia American Avocet American Avocet American Wigeon Anise Swallowtail Anna’s Hummingbird Banana slug (dark) Barn Swallow Belted Kingfisher Black phoebe Black-Billed Magpie Black-Crowned Night Heron Black-necked Stilt Botta’s Pocket Gopher Bufflehead Canada Goose (infant) Cedar Waxwing Chyrus Common Raven Coot Crow Flamingo Golden Paper Wasp Golden-crowned Sparrow Goose and Gosling Great Blue Heron Great Egret Great Kiskadee Green Iguana Harbor Seals House finch (male) Largus California Least Sandpiper Mallard Masked Chafer Monarch Butterfly Caterpillar Mourning Dove Mouse (video still) Northern Shoveler Nuttall's Woodpecker Potato Aphid Praying Mantis Red Eared Slider Ring-Billed Gull Ruby-throated, hummingbird Ruddy Daggerwing Salt Marsh Moth Scudderia Furcata Seven-Spot Ladybird Shield-backed katydid Snowy egret Song Sparrow Song sparrow Squirrel (red) (video still) Turkey Vulture Twin-Spotted Sphinx (moth) Western Boxelder Bug Western Conifer Seed Bug Western Fence Lizard Western Gull White Crowned-Sparrow Wild Turkey Willet Yellow-Romped Warbler Yucatán Jay

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
Milky white pearl marble nails with gold starfish charms
Pearl Starfish Milky marble set with gold starfish charms and pearl accents
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 Pearl Starfish 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.

Diagram comparing an agentic harness with agentic housing
July 2026 · Architecture guide

Building on Agentic Systems

A practical guide to designing the housing around the model loop: state, triggers, plugins, permissions, memory, observability, and human escalation.

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May 2026 · Experiment

Agent Ad Lab

A landing-page experiment for measuring whether AI agents, browser automation systems, crawlers, and humans respond differently to agent-readable web resources.

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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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Travis Barton

About

I'm Travis, and I work on Gemini Enterprise at Google. 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.