The short version
I’m Forrester Terry — but most people call me FoFo. I’m a self-taught software engineer who has spent the last 11+ years learning the craft on the job, and these days I manage a small software engineering team. On the side I run Sweet Papa Technologies, a small bootstrapped studio where I build AI-powered products and tools.
The story
My path into software wasn’t the typical one. I started in IT support — fixing laptops, running scripts, learning out of necessity. From there I picked things up one project at a time: bash scripts became Python tools, Python tools became web apps, web apps became cross-platform applications, and eventually some of those became AI-powered systems. Along the way I moved from support into development, and later into leading a development team.
My day job these days is helping a team build and maintain a set of internal applications — a mix of support tooling, developer tooling, identity and security work, and cloud infrastructure. It’s taught me a lot about how software actually lives once real people depend on it.
Sweet Papa Technologies is where I get to build and ship things end to end. It’s also where I’ve been exploring what AI-assisted development looks like in practice: building a mobile game in about 30 hours, running an art-to-Etsy pipeline, experimenting with agentic coding assistants, and publishing fine-tuned models on Hugging Face. Some of it turned into real products (FoFoClip, ARTbyFOFO, two Google Play games), some became open source (eGit, startupctl), and some became posts on Dev.to.
The consulting side grew out of all of this. I enjoy working with teams where the job spans a few hats — architecture, hands-on engineering, some management, some DevOps — and where the interesting part is fitting newer AI tooling into existing systems, real users, and a team that has to live with the result.
I’m based in the Bay Area. I make lo-fi music as Sweet Papa and the Tones. I tend to think in systems and analogies. And I care a lot about making these tools accessible to anyone willing to put in the work — because that’s how I got here.
How I think about AI
I call the idea I keep coming back to Force Multiplier Engineering: start with the problem, use AI to amplify good judgment rather than replace it, and ship work the team can still maintain later. I use AI a lot, and I try to stay honest about where it helps and where it doesn’t — I’m still learning that line like everyone else.