Robert Melton

I build things that ship to production and lead teams that do the same. 20+ years turning ideas into systems that serve real users at scale.

What I Do#

Owner of Intelligrit. Program Tech Lead at Skyward IT Solutions leading 30 engineers across 5 work streams delivering federal AI solutions. Active Top Secret clearance.

AI integrated into every workflow step: architecture decisions, code implementation, commit messages, code reviews, documentation, status reporting, deployment verification. Not incremental improvement - complete workflow transformation. Recently led a 2.3-person team to transform 1.3M lines of legacy Java/XML into 120K lines of modern TypeScript using 85% AI-generated code. 10:1 reduction. 75 working days to production - not a test, not R&D, a mission-critical application.

I build custom MCPs, agents, and CLI tools to enable this across teams. The tooling matters as much as the technique.

I use dozens of AI systems daily - personal secretary, email triage, Jira management, scheduling, research. AI handles the busy work so I can focus on the work that matters.

Accessibility#

I’m legally blind (roughly 9% of normal vision) and use screen readers and accessibility tools daily. This isn’t a side interest - it’s how I work.

Vision loss started in 2022. It drives much of my recent open source: SwiftMac brings native macOS speech to Emacspeak for blind developers. FFWF has full VoiceOver support because I need it myself. The -wrap projects (gh-wrap, jira-wrap, confluence-wrap) make CLI tools accessible through Emacs with Emacspeak integration.

AI is a game-changer for accessibility. Problems that were always too niche to prioritize - too far down the totem pole - can now get solved. I can build tools for my specific needs in hours instead of months. The long tail of accessibility finally has a path forward.

Building tools I actually use keeps me honest about what works.

Communities#

I build communities around what I love and back projects I believe in before they’re proven.

First funder of Neovim when it was just an idea on Bountysource. Founded #vim on Freenode when Vim was my editor. Still moderate r/vim (400K+ members, 10+ years running). Created kakoune.com when I moved to Kakoune - the official community site for 7+ years now.

Moved to Emacs because of Emacspeak - T.V. Raman’s screen reader that makes Emacs genuinely accessible. Recently forked it as Emacsvox to experiment with modernization. Still contribute upstream to the original.

The editors change. The community building doesn’t.

Background#

Key personnel in $190M+ in exits. Some highlights:

Digital Turbine (NYSE: APPS) - Director of Engineering. 1B+ monthly users, 15B daily events, 8th highest trafficked site in US. Key personnel in $66M Mobile Posse acquisition. Built and led 35 remote engineers across 6 countries with 97% retention.
AOL - Senior Tech Lead. Led Winamp Cloud platform serving 2M+ users.
IXI Corporation - Lead Developer. Real-time credit score distribution system. Key personnel in $124M Equifax acquisition.
Search for Yeti - Technical Co-founder. Won TechCrunch DC Pitch-Off 2014. Patent intelligence platform with computer vision and NLP analyzing 5M patents.

Full history on LinkedIn.

The Stack#

Whatever solves the problem. Frequently: Go, Python, TypeScript, Swift. Databases: PostgreSQL, ScyllaDB, Redis. Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform. Make for everything.

60+ repositories on GitHub. Arctic Code Vault Contributor. Most are tools I built because I needed them.

Southern Maryland#

Home is Southern Maryland with my incredible and endlessly supportive wife Nicole. Lucky to have our sons Collin and Ethan nearby. Three dogs - Miso, Toast, and Snoopy. The quiet helps with focus, and so does a horse named Pocket.

About