Hello World!
There’s a miniature therapy horse in my life named Willow. There’s also a local AI agent I built named Jinx, running quietly on a Mac Mini in my home office, remembering things, learning things, helping me think.
I mention both because they tell you more about me than my resume ever could.
My name is Laura Florey. I’m a full-stack developer and digital strategist working in healthcare in South Alabama. I’m a one-woman department — developer, writer, SEO, security, social media — for platforms that actually matter to people’s lives. It’s meaningful work. It’s also exhausting in ways that are hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t done it.
So I build things on the side. I always have.
Recently, my daughter Jenny and I entered a competition with an AI-driven contract analysis system we built together. We won. Standing in that room, having built something real that solved a real problem, I felt something click that I’d been missing for a while. That feeling has a name. It’s called this is what I’m supposed to be doing.
I also make art with machines. Generative AI art that has shown in juried exhibitions, that lives on platforms where people collect it, that occasionally stops someone cold. I find that just as meaningful as the code.
I’m writing this Substack because I’ve noticed something. The loudest voices in tech right now are either catastrophizing or cheerleading. Both exhaust me. What I don’t hear enough of — what I think a lot of people feel privately but won’t say publicly — is the honest middle. The “this is genuinely amazing and also genuinely uncertain and I’m building anyway” version.
That’s where I live. Somewhere between the cutting edge and the kudzu, if you want to get geographical about it.
I’m not a Silicon Valley insider. I’m a Gen-X geek in South Alabama with a therapy horse, a daughter I build startups with, an AI agent that remembers my conversations, and a deep belief that the most interesting technology stories aren’t happening in San Francisco.
They’re happening everywhere else. In businesses, non-profits, home offices and small towns where nobody’s watching.
This is where I’ll tell mine.
