Dean Baker

Dean Baker

Technology leadership, engineering teams, and whatever I'm building this week.

Head of Engineering at a scale-up in Australia. I spend my days on engineering roadmaps, architecture and ways of working — and my evenings building small things with AI to find out what it’s actually good at.

Built with AI

The Scratch Pad

See everything

Small tools, one-pagers and half-finished ideas I build with AI in the gaps between other things. Shipped over polished; the point is to learn where these tools help and where they fall over.

prototype Nov 2026

Yabber

A dictation keyboard for iPhone that never sends your voice anywhere. Tap the mic in any app and Parakeet transcribes it on the phone's Neural Engine, usually in under a tenth of a second.

  • Claude Code
  • Swift
  • FluidAudio
  • Parakeet
live Oct 2026

Rep Snacks

A five-minute bodyweight move or stretch at quarter past every working hour. Install it to your phone's Home Screen and it nudges you with a push notification, rotates through squats, push-ups, planks and stretches, and keeps the same one for next time if you skip.

  • Claude
  • Vanilla JS
  • Web Push
  • Cloudflare Workers

Notes & talks

Writing

All posts
  1. Blog

    Local Dictation on a Mac: Parakeet, Hex, and a Cleanup Model from Ollama

    Wispr-style dictation on a Mac, with the speech model and the cleanup model both running locally.

  2. Blog

    Local Dictation on an iPhone: Building Yabber

    A dictation keyboard for my iPhone that runs Parakeet on the Neural Engine, built in an evening with Claude Code.

  3. Blog

    Tiny Helper Apps for $0: GitHub Pages, and Push Notifications from a Cloudflare Worker

    Drafted with AI assistance and reviewed by Dean.

  4. Reference

    The Second Arrow: A Crash Course in Emotional Non-Reactivity

    Reference post: drafted with AI assistance and reviewed by Dean.

  5. Blog

    Remote Collaboration

    Resetting my communication ways of working in 2023