Hi, my name is Ojārs. I was born and raised in Riga.

I’m drawn to work that requires figuring out something new — I believe collective intelligence finds solutions faster than any individual can. And in my view, the web and software should be open and decentralized, which is why I run and host my own solutions myself.

Lately that has meant a lot of artificial intelligence: locally-run language models, RAG-based knowledge bases, and AI workflows that get far more out of modest hardware than ought to be possible. I’ve built self-hosted LLM infrastructure with Latvian-language support, AI assistants that review my code, and a RAG layer over my personal knowledge base — all on my own machines, with no dependence on external cloud platforms.

The day job: I’ve spent more than twenty years in IT, leading projects and teams. Today I look after platforms and portals for clients in Northern Europe and the Baltics — billing, e-commerce, payments, third-party integrations, cloud and containerized services, customer self-service — both building them and running them day to day. Before that came billing and customer-communication platforms in Scandinavia, and public-sector work including cross-border integration platforms commissioned by the European Commission. Along the way I’ve managed budgets and contracts, set up SLAs and KPIs, negotiated with PCAOB-registered auditors, and hired the people who made it all work.

Years ago I told a magazine interviewer that I’d “be a better father now” — and life gave me the chance to test that. There are now five little captains in the house. It’s great. I love it! And I really am a much better father than I was at twenty.

Here I write about whatever I find important or worth sharing. Back in the day I did something similar at the “radical” portal Publikai.lv and, together with Edgars and Didzis, on the podcast «Alus Pučs», which aired on Radio NABA for a while.