JOHN FOVAL
Hi. I'm John. I build odd and useful things, usually at the same time, usually later at night than I should.
I'm married to my best friend, Haley. We have five wonderful children. If you have met me for longer than about four minutes, you already know both of those facts, because they are the two most interesting things about me and I am not subtle.
WHAT I DO FOR WORK
I own Nurik. We help businesses actually leverage the capabilities of AI — not the demo version, not the keynote version, the version where real work gets done on a Tuesday by people with real jobs.
I've spent eleven years in business technology and three of them squarely in AI. That's long enough to have seen a few waves come in, and long enough to know the difference between a tool that changes how a company works and a tool that just changes how a company's slides look.
I also wrote a book about it — Knowledge Workers: A Practical Guide to AI. It comes with a copy-and-paste prompt library, because a book about practical AI that doesn't hand you anything you can use on Monday morning isn't practical, it's just a book. You can read the whole thing free, or buy it on Amazon if you like holding things.
JESUS
I talk about Jesus a lot. I'm not going to bury that in the footer and hope you don't notice it, because he is the best part of my life and hiding it would be strange.
I'm not interested in arguing anybody into anything. I'm interested in the fact that grace is real, that it found me, and that it keeps finding me on the days I've earned exactly none of it. If you want to talk about that — genuinely, at any hour, from anywhere on the belief spectrum — I'm easy to reach and I won't make it weird.
If you need prayer, ask me. I'll actually do it.
THE THINGS I MAKE
I have never been able to hold still, so there's a list:
- Mainline — a free app built on David Allen's Getting Things Done. Every open loop out of your head and into a system you trust. GTD changed my life and the tooling was never quite right, so I built the one I wanted.
- Music Theory Bootcamp — learn the actual language of music in 30 days. Not tricks. The language.
- Original music — songs I wrote and recorded, scattered across the internet like a proper indie artist who has never once optimized a release.
- Browser games — a growing arcade of things I built for fun. BotBait is the good one.
- Faleni — an entire language I built from scratch, designed to be the easiest to learn and the clearest to speak, with one rule for inventing a word for anything. 535 words so far. Nobody asked me to do this.
- Downhill mountain biking — not something I make, something that makes me. Gravity does most of the work. I do the rest, and occasionally the ground does some of it too.
WHY THIS WEBSITE LOOKS LIKE THIS
I was born in 1988. I wanted a personal site that felt like something instead of a template with my face on it — something you'd actually poke at for a minute and then tell someone about. So it's an operating system that doesn't exist, for a computer nobody made, with a dad joke bot in the corner and a photo of my family bouncing around the screen like a DVD logo.
It's one HTML file. No framework, no build step, no tracking, no cookie banner. The music you can turn on in the taskbar is generated live in your browser — there's no audio file anywhere on this server. I think that's funny and I think it's also kind of the point.
IF YOU WANT TO TALK
Reasons people write to me: they want to talk about AI. They need prayer. They want to talk about Jesus. They want to learn GTD. They want to jam, or record something, or take music lessons. They have an odd job. They want to speak a language I made up. They want to go ride bikes down a mountain.
All of those are correct reasons. It goes straight to my personal inbox and I do my best to reply to everything I get.
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