Duane Fields
About

Hi, I'm Duane.

I've worked at every scale, from first engineer at a startup to a 150-developer engineering organization. Small teams are where automation pays off fastest, and they're who I work with now.

I graduated from Texas A&M's College of Engineering in 1993 with a degree in Industrial Distribution and coursework in computer science, and I've been building software and leading the teams behind it ever since, more than 30 years now. Early on I was a product manager for Netscape Navigator, then an engineer at IBM and Sun Microsystems, and one of the first engineers at multiple Austin startups. I also wrote two programming books for Manning.

From there I led mobile engineering at Demand Media through its IPO and at Tastemade, then spent ten years at GLG, a consulting services firm, rising from principal engineer to VP of Software Engineering and helping grow the engineering organization to 150 developers.

Most recently I ran the technology organization at Sur La Table, an e-commerce and brick-and-mortar retailer. I sat on the executive team, with a 30-person organization and a $3M budget. I led the company's AI adoption, from the technical rollout to training people in every business function. So I've been the one weighing what technology costs against what it saves, not just the one building it.

I'm still hands-on every day. I built my own AI agent, along with the MCP servers that connect it to my mail, calendar, and task manager and the self-hosted infrastructure it runs on. When you work with me, you get the person who does the work, not a handoff to someone junior.

Over the years I've built iPhone and Android apps, websites, and enterprise systems, running on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Cloudflare. On the AI side, Claude and ChatGPT are home base: I've rolled out both professionally and use both every day. I've also worked with Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Azure OpenAI, Grok, and TypeSafe's Jev, plus embeddings and search, the technology that lets AI find answers in your own documents.

I started Fast Wombat in 2009 as a side consulting practice, and it's now my full-time focus. I'm based in Austin and work with businesses nationwide. Connect with me on LinkedIn.

Career

  1. 2026 Fast Wombat, full time (founded as a side practice in 2009)
  2. 2025 Sur La Table, Senior Director of Engineering
  3. 2014 GLG, principal engineer to VP of Software Engineering
  4. 2012 Tastemade, Head of Mobile
  5. 2008 Demand Media, Director of Mobile Engineering
  6. 2004 Pluck, first engineer and Software Development Manager
  7. 2002 Powered, Senior Software Engineer
  8. 2001 Sun Microsystems, Development Lead
  9. 2001 Netspend, Senior Software Engineer
  10. 2000 Caleo Networks, Director of Web Development
  11. 1998 IBM Tivoli, Senior Software Engineer
  12. 1996 Netscape, Product Manager for Navigator
  13. 1993 InSoft, Manager of Engineering Operations
  14. 1993 Texas A&M University, B.S. in Industrial Distribution, College of Engineering

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