01 / bird photography
Field-photo slots are ready for the real archive.
travisbarton.com / three-lane archive / April 2026
Birds, nails, and robot side quests.
A personal archive for three recurring lanes: bird photos, nail studies, and small projects led by the robot build.
The bird and nail sections stay placeholder-first for now, while the robot notes and project trail are already live.
02 / nail art
Concept tiles hold the place until finished sets arrive.
03 / robot + personal projects
The live robot build log stays front and center.
Three lanes
Minimal, honest, and easy to scan.
placeholder-ready
species / place / light
Field-note archive
live now
robot / blog / prototypes
Robot build log
concept tiles
palette / pattern / finish
Future set studies
Three pillars
A minimalist homepage, organized like a small archive.
Each pillar gets its own visual lane, clear placeholder treatment, and a direct next step instead of one generic portfolio grid.
Field-note archive
Species, location, date, light, and one sentence about why a frame earned a permanent slot.
Placeholders ready for real photos
Robot first, then the other rabbit holes
The robot leads the homepage, with room behind it for essays, prototypes, and useful build notes.
Robot build log is already live
Design studies with actual visual rhythm
Concept tiles stand in for finished sets now, but the layout already supports close-ups, palette notes, and finished looks.
Concept placeholders intentionally visible
00 / about
Hi, I’m Travis.
By day, I’m a machine learning engineer at Meta. This site is for the other stuff: robotics projects, AI tooling side quests, bird photos that deserve better organization, and nail art I actually want to keep.
I like building things just to see if they can exist, then turning the useful ones into notes, demos, and public build logs. If it survives long enough to matter, it should probably have a home.
Main interests
AI tools, real-world robots, birding, visual experiments
What this site is for
Keeping the good artifacts instead of letting them disappear into chats and camera rolls
Elsewhere
GitHub for code, LinkedIn for the standard professional version
01 / bird photography
Bird archive, with the layout ready before the photo dump.
No bird photos are checked into the repo yet, so this section stays honest: elegant placeholders now, with the framing and metadata rhythm already locked in for the real archive later.
Placeholder system
Every bird slot already reserves room for species, location, date, and one sentence about the moment. The placeholders are visible so that standard never gets fuzzy.
Slot 01
placeholder frame
images/birds/dawn-heron.jpg
Slot 02
placeholder frame
images/birds/cedar-waxwing.jpg
Slot 03
placeholder frame
images/birds/marsh-wren.jpg
02 / personal projects and blog
Robot build first, with writing and side projects behind it.
The homepage points straight at the robot project first, then leaves room for essays, experiments, and future build logs without falling back to a generic portfolio grid.
Featured now
Rover, the AI Dog
My favorite side projects usually involve sensors, a slightly unreasonable end state, and a strong excuse to learn a new stack. Rover is the clearest version of that instinct: a ROS2 robot that is slowly turning into the kind of machine you can call from another room.
Now
Bring-up, sensors, web control, and a stable base for demos.
Next
Mapping, autonomy experiments, and more public notes from the process.
Why it leads the homepage
- Live LIDAR, IMU, and web control as a stable baseline.
- Foxglove visualization and repeatable bring-up scripts.
- A clear path toward mapping, autonomy, voice, and future blog entries.
Rover, the AI Dog
ROS2 robot platform on a Raspberry Pi with sensors, mapping, a web control layer, and a very clear roadmap.
Open project
Friction Removal and agent platforms
Why applied ML systems win on interface and operations design more often than raw model quality.
Read essay
Code, experiments, and repos
The broader trail: prototypes, robot work, and whatever else is currently getting pushed into version control.
Visit profile
Notes index
Current archive
- Friction Removal Is Why Claude Code Style Agent Platforms Are Becoming Platforms March 7, 2026 / essay
- Rover, the AI Dog: a robot that can come when called Project page / ROS2 robot build log
- More posts coming Placeholders intentionally left visible so future entries keep the same rhythm.
03 / nail art
Nail studies that still feel intentional before the real photos land.
Finished nail photos are not checked into the repo yet, so this section uses clearly labeled concept tiles instead of pretending the archive is already complete.
Future asset plan
Swap these concept visuals for finished sets, close-up detail shots, and one short palette note per set without changing the homepage structure.
Concept palette placeholders
Placeholder concept
Placeholder concept
Placeholder concept
