Rusty Data is a side consulting practice to build data and AI tooling for businesses with limited technical expertise. This space is also a showcase of the things I build for fun in my homelab! It's mostly an excuse to business expense my AI hobbies.
I'm Zack, a data scientist with 8+ years building machine learning models, ETL pipelines, and production systems. I pair program with my golden retriever, Oakley. She is my compliance officer and does an excellent job enforcing screen-time restrictions.
Outside of my day-job, I build self-hosted platforms, AI-powered workflows, and the infrastructure to make it all run.
Rusty Data is where that work lives.
Integrate LLMs and agentic AI workflows where they actually save time and money.
Solutions are only as powerful as the data flowing into them. In the words of my first boss, "strapping a jet engine onto a lawn mower will just tear up your yard."
Language models will not solve all your needs. Purposeful machine learning models are the path to making data-driven decisions.
I'm too cheap for the cloud. Local self-hosted, containerized platforms allow for total control. The cloud is always there if something needs to scale.
Self-hosted containerized infrastructure with GitOps-style continuous deployment, Cloudflare tunnels, secrets management, and orchestration. Running production services local and cloud services.
Automated daily API ETL, sales tracking, ML-powered stock forecasting, shift alerts, and Power BI dashboards for a consumer electronics brand. End-to-end data pipeline from ingestion to visualization.
Self-hosted Open WebUI instances with RAG capabilities, custom AI tooling with Claude Code, and consulting on practical AI adoption strategies for businesses looking to automate intelligently.