Selected work · A journal

The stuff I'm proud of.

I'm Cort — a software engineer who ships. Real-time audio engines in C++, AI-native applications, and data systems that turn mess into something you can actually use.

25+ years building for Fortune 500s and startups across finance, energy, healthcare, and marketing. This page is the highlight reel — the projects that show what I do when I get to build the whole thing.

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Years shipping software
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Industries delivered in
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Synth presets crafted
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The highlight reel

Things I built — and why they matter

Each of these I designed and built end to end: the DSP or the data pipeline, the AI integration, the interface, and the page selling it. Newest first.

2026 · In the lab

CortComp

Prototype
Input level → Output level → 1:1 Threshold
Upward (softs ↑) Downward (louds ↓) Invert (beyond ∞:1)

A dynamics processor that does something most compressors physically can't: make the softs loud and the louds soft — past the point of a limiter. Its INVERT mode drives the transfer slope negative (beyond ∞:1), so louder input yields quieter output: true dynamic inversion.

  • Header-only, JUCE-free DSP engine — unit-testable offline, no framework lock-in
  • Stereo-linked feedforward detector that reacts to the louder channel to preserve the stereo image
  • Three simultaneous behaviors — downward, upward, and inversion — from one clean transfer curve
C++ / JUCEDSPVST3Real-time
2025–2026 · Shipped & free

CortSynth

Shipped
CortSynth main synthesizer interface

A complete VST3 synth, sampler, and drum machine in one plugin — the "everything" instrument. Dual-oscillator hybrid engine, physically-modeled instruments, 200+ presets, and an AI that builds patches from a plain-English sentence. Downloadable, with a demo video and real users.

  • AI Tone Designer: describe a sound in words, get an editable patch — Claude API driving real synthesis
  • Physical modeling: Karplus-Strong strings, a dispersive stiff-string piano with resonating soundboard and sympathetic strings
  • Zero heap allocations on the audio thread — glitch-free under load, built for live performance
  • 2× oversampling, FDN reverb with shimmer, a rotary Leslie, and an offline preset generator
Modulation Constellation
Sampler mode
Drum pad grid
C++ / JUCEClaude APIDSPVST3 + Standalone
Product page → Demo video →
2026 · Commercial release

CortVerb

$99 · Launching
CortVerb reverb interface with live visualization screen

A commercial VST3 reverb built on a Hybrid FDN engine, wrapped in a hardware-grade interface: a central digital screen that visualizes the reverb live across six pages, an auto-duck sidechain, and 12 tactile knobs. Proof I can take an engine all the way to a product people pay for.

  • Hybrid feedback-delay-network reverb tuned for musical, mix-ready tails
  • Real-time visualization screen with six views — the reverb, made legible
  • Auto-duck sidechain so the reverb ceilings gracefully under a busy mix
C++ / JUCEDSPVST3Product
Product page →
2026 · Live demo

Apartment Finder

Live
Apartment Finder dashboard with interactive map and scored listings

An AI-native rental aggregator that scrapes listings from six sources, then uses vision AI to actually look at every photo — scoring quality and reading off flooring, natural light, and kitchen style. Everything lands on an interactive map-and-table dashboard with commute scoring.

  • Multi-source scraping across Craigslist, Zillow, Apartments.com, Trulia, Realtor.com, and Zumper (Playwright)
  • Gemini Vision scores photo quality and extracts features no listing field contains
  • Auto-generated 450+ individual detail pages with galleries, lightboxes, and commute breakdowns
  • Scam detection from price anomalies and stock-photo patterns; work-commute distance scoring
Gemini VisionPythonPlaywrightLeaflet / Maps
Project page → Live demo →
2026 · Live tool

CatfishCheck

Live
CatfishCheck investigation interface

A self-service OSINT tool for verifying online identities. Upload photos, phone numbers, social handles, and messages about a suspected scammer; get back a report that surfaces the red flags — built with privacy as a first principle.

  • Reverse image search, carrier lookup, and a geo-verification beacon in one workflow
  • AI-assisted analysis that turns scattered evidence into a readable risk report
  • Case-based investigation UI that keeps each subject organized and reviewable
AI AnalysisJavaScriptOSINTPrivacy
Project page →
2026 · In development

Ironclad

Coming soon
Ironclad amp-style distortion plugin interface

An amp-style distortion plugin with four distinct voicings and a focused tone stack, dressed in a bold hardware-inspired UI. Rounds out a coherent plugin line — synth, reverb, distortion, compressor — all sharing an engineering discipline.

C++ / JUCEDSPVST3Distortion
Product page →

Why hire me

What I actually bring to a team

The through-line across everything above: I take an idea from a napkin to a shipped, polished thing — and I use AI to move faster than a team without it.

🚀

I ship the whole thing

Engine, interface, and the page that sells it. I don't need a spec handed down in three parts — I can own a product from architecture to launch.

Hard real-time engineering

Zero-allocation audio threads, oversampling, physical modeling, DSP that can't glitch. If a domain has tight constraints and no room for error, I'm comfortable there.

🧠

AI where it does real work

Not a chatbot bolted on. Vision models that read photos, language models that generate valid patches, pipelines that score and decide — AI as a load-bearing part of the product.

🗺️

Mess into something usable

Scraping, cleaning, enriching, and visualizing real-world data — turning unstructured listings, photos, and text into searchable, scored, actionable dashboards.

The toolkit

C++PythonJavaScript JUCE / DSPClaude APIGemini Vision FastAPIReactNode.js Playwright / ScrapingSQLAWS DockerLeaflet / MapsGit

About this page

This page is itself the argument. I built it with an AI coding agent as a pair — it read my whole body of work, matched my site's design system, and helped me shape and polish this in a single sitting.

That's the point I want a future employer to take away: I don't just use AI as a feature in products — I work with it as a force multiplier. The same leverage that put this page together is the leverage I bring to a team's roadmap. More shipped, faster, without cutting the quality corner.

Let's talk

Want someone who ships?

If you're building something ambitious and want an engineer who can own it end to end — and who already builds with AI, not around it — I'd love to hear from you.