AI Instructor & Technology Tutor · Moses Lake, Washington

Douglas Gorden Jr.

I teach people to use technology they were told was beyond them — and I build the systems I teach from.

509-230-4576 Grant County, WA gordenwebdesign.com
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About

The job has always been the same one: sit next to someone and stay there until it makes sense.

It started in a community college computer lab in 2006, tutoring students who had been handed coursework nobody had taught them how to approach. Twenty years later I'm doing the same work at a bigger scale — I write and teach My AI Journey, a full AI curriculum for small business owners in rural America who have been told AI matters and given nothing they can actually use.

The technical practice exists to feed the teaching. Since 2003 I've run Gorden Web Design & Computer Repair — websites, hosting, repairs — and over the past year I've gone deep into applied AI: agents, Claude Skills, MCP servers, orchestration dashboards, and generative applications that do production work. I teach from what I've actually built and broken, which is the difference between a lesson that holds up and one that falls apart the first time a student's real invoice doesn't look like the example.

What ties all of it together is translation: taking what the technology can genuinely do and handing it to someone in language they already own.

Teaching & Training

Twenty years of sitting next to someone until it clicks.

Tutoring is where this started — a community college helpdesk and open lab in 2006 — and it's what the technical work is for now. Everything below the fold exists so that the teaching has something real standing behind it.

Founder & Instructor · 2026 – Present

My AI Journey — myaijourney.online

I wrote and teach a complete AI curriculum for people with no technical background: small business owners in rural America who have been told AI matters and handed nothing they can actually use.

  • Curriculum, three stages — Understand (what AI is good at, and where it confidently makes things up, plus the vocabulary to ask a real question), Use (writing in your own voice, customer replies, quotes and paperwork, photos and posts), Grow (getting found, privacy and safety, your first automation, and knowing when a human is still the right answer).
  • Lesson design — every module opens with a free starter lesson and ends with usable work rather than theory. The bar I hold myself to: if you can send a text message, you can do this.
  • Two-tier delivery — an open-door public site with no signup, plus a membership platform carrying the full curriculum, saved progress, a free tier, and a $29/month member tier, with new modules shipping every month.
  • Cohort support — a Facebook community where students bring their own quotes, invoices, and posts and get walked through them in public, so the whole group learns from one person's stuck point.
  • Local examples throughout — contractors, farms, retail shops, salons, and supply businesses from this region, not generic case studies from somewhere else.

College Tutoring

  • Big Bend Community College — Technology Helpdesk Aid & Tutor, October 2006 to December 2008.
  • Tutored students one-on-one in computer coursework in the open lab, working from wherever each student actually was rather than where the syllabus assumed they'd be.
  • Front-line support for students and staff on lab machines, the campus portal, and everyday end-user problems — the same translation work, just at a walk-up counter.
  • Held the role while completing Cisco Networking Academy coursework at the same college, which meant tutoring peers through material I was working through myself.

Client Training

  • Post-launch training is part of every website build — owners and their staff learn to add pages, update content, and handle their own site instead of calling me for every change.
  • Twenty-three years of walking non-technical people through their own machines: repairs explained rather than performed silently, so the same problem doesn't return.
  • Training built for people who have been made to feel stupid by technology before, which changes how you open a session.

Published Instruction

  • Public setup tutorial for the Hermes autonomous agent — written so someone outside my head can follow it end to end.
  • Written architecture reports and how-to write-ups in the Learning Center.
  • 30-day email and blog course series on websites, SEO, and small-business marketing — sequenced instruction, not one-off posts.
  • I write the tutorials other people follow, which is its own discipline: you find out fast which explanations don't survive contact with a reader.

How I Teach

  • Plain language first — jargon is introduced only after the idea underneath it already makes sense.
  • Finish with something real — a lesson ends with work the student can use Monday morning, not a concept they can recite.
  • Their material, not mine — students bring their own invoices, quotes, and posts, because the example that matters is the one on their desk.
  • Patience as method — most people who "can't do computers" were simply never given a place to start.

AI & Automation · 2025–2026

Built and deployed, not just evaluated — this is what the teaching is drawn from.

Everything below is work I've personally shipped, integrated, or published. It is also the source material for the curriculum: I don't teach a tool I haven't put into production and watched fail at least once. Where there's a public write-up, it lives in the Learning Center.

Current projects

Learning platform · live

My AI Journey — the build

The curriculum is covered above; this is the platform underneath it, designed and shipped solo. Two properties, one course.

  • Public site — mobile-first static build with a modern 3D treatment, using generative 3D assets produced in Higgsfield and hand-integrated. Deployed to my own Hostinger infrastructure rather than a platform URL, so the domain, SEO, and analytics stay mine.
  • Membership platform — membership.myaijourney.online: gated curriculum delivery with accounts, saved lesson progress, a free tier, and a paid member tier, built to take new modules every month without a rebuild.
  • Community layer — a Facebook group wired in as the primary call to action, converting readers into an ongoing cohort.

Agent infrastructure

Hermes Mission Control OS

A centralized orchestration dashboard for running a fleet of AI agents instead of one chat window at a time — built in two forms, a React application and a self-contained single-file HTML build that runs with no toolchain.

  • Swarm orchestration — TAW × Hermes multi-agent routing, with agents dispatched and monitored from one control surface.
  • SkillClaw — a skill-evolution layer that lets the agent set improve its own tooling over time.
  • Governance — role-based access control plus live cost telemetry, so token spend is visible per agent and per run.
  • Deployment — documented architecture covering the API-key and backend-proxy requirements for standalone use.

AI application

Hermes Affiliate Blog Master

A membership-gated publishing platform that pairs Claude-powered article generation with the affiliate infrastructure a content business actually needs.

  • Article generation — Claude-driven drafting pipeline built around reusable prompt templates.
  • Affiliate link vault — centralized link storage and injection so monetization isn't retrofitted post-publish.
  • Access control — role-based membership tiers; production hardening path mapped to Supabase for server-side auth and row-level security.
  • MCP server — a companion FastMCP server (SQLite-backed) exposing the platform's data to agents as tools.

Capability areas

Agent Development

  • Hermes Agent — deployed and configured the self-improving autonomous agent across Windows 11 / WSL2 and portable installs; documented its tool and plugin architecture, tuned context-compression and provider switching, integrated it with a GoHighLevel CRM and with NotebookLM, and published a public setup tutorial.
  • Agentic Agent OS — researched and built a Next.js agent-operations dashboard with its own design system and a written architecture report.
  • Claude-to-Hermes bridging — investigated and prototyped cross-runtime handoff between Claude and a local Hermes agent.

MCP Servers & Claude Skills

  • Skills authored — packaged reusable Claude Skills, including a GoHighLevel CRM skill and a static-site deployment skill that ships pages safely into subfolders of a live WordPress host.
  • Live MCP integrations — WordPress/WooCommerce, Shopify, Hostinger, Notion, Supabase, and Mailchimp wired up as agent-callable tools.
  • Custom servers — FastMCP servers over SQLite for project-specific data.
  • Real limits documented — mapped where platform APIs stop (e.g. GoHighLevel pipeline writes) instead of pretending automation is total.

Applications Shipped

  • Membership web app — full build on Abacus.AI with inventory management, gallery, blog, Stripe subscription billing, and buyer wishlist matching.
  • AdGenius — product URL to finished video advertisement, using Gemini 3 and Veo 3.1.
  • VidScribe AI — video transcription and content analysis with Google Search grounding.
  • PodMaster AI — print-on-demand design automation pipeline.
  • SalesPro Elite — white-label GoHighLevel CRM offering packaged for small-business clients.
  • Business launch kit — an AI business-model launch kit and a structured business-interview prompt tool used to scope client work.

AI Web Properties

  • gordenweb72.com — a gaming PC build guide with five full RTX 5060 builds, structured data, affiliate monetization, and FTC-compliant disclosure.
  • Roadside & automotive emergency funnels — AI-assisted affiliate properties built end to end, from research to published content.
  • AI search optimization — pages written and marked up to be cited by AI assistants, not just ranked by search engines.

Content Systems at Scale

  • 509 Business Directory — a regional directory concept for eastern Washington with tiered membership pricing and a 20-post content library covering agriculture, wine tourism, bilingual marketing, and wildfire planning.
  • Editorial pipelines — 30-day email and blog series produced for small-business lead generation, SEO, and an industry editorial calendar.
  • SEO Domain Master — specification for a multi-tool SEO platform aimed at agencies: 100 tool types mapped across 13 categories.

Model & Cost Engineering

  • Model routing — OpenRouter across 300+ models, no vendor lock-in; pulled live pricing programmatically to benchmark cost per capability.
  • Open-weight models — Nous Research models in production agent loops; DeepHermes 3 Mistral 24B as the budget entry point, Hermes 4 70B as the best overall value.
  • Local inference — LM Studio for free local runs where privacy or budget rules out an API.
  • Running lean — architecture decisions made under a real budget ceiling, not a lab one.

Automation & Data

  • Workflow — Make.com, Airtable, Firebase, Supabase.
  • Data extraction — Apify for web scraping and structured collection.
  • Commerce automation — GenX Terminal, a Shopify print-on-demand store audited and operated through MCP tooling: catalog cleanup, Printify fulfillment, SEO-driven collection restructuring.
  • Prompt engineering — maintained prompt libraries for image generation, product design, and code assistance.

AI Media

  • Video — HeyGen, Seedance 2.0, Veo 3.1, Descript transcript-based editing.
  • Image — Gemini, Nano Banana, Artlist.
  • 3D — Higgsfield and Meshy generative modeling for production web assets.
  • Research — NotebookLM as a knowledge hub wired into agent workflows.

Platforms I've built with

Claude & Claude CodeClaude SkillsMCP FastMCPHermes AgentNous Research LM StudioGoogle AI StudioGemini NotebookLMAbacus.AIBase44 Manus.aiGensparkCREAO OpenRouterLightning.aiMake.com ApifyAirtableFirebase SupabaseNotionHeyGen DescriptHiggsfieldMeshy Veo 3.1GoHighLevelShopify

Ongoing training

Outskill / GrowthSchool Generative AI Mastermind — three cohorts across 2026 — plus the AI Generalist Accelerator curriculum, AI SEO Success Lab, and continuing coursework. I also write the tutorials others follow.

Web & Small Business

What I've been doing since before "the cloud" was a word anyone used.

Teaching
Curriculum design and authoring, one-on-one and lab tutoring, adult and non-technical learners, plain-language technical explanation, written tutorials and course series, post-launch client training, cohort and community facilitation.
AI Development
Agent deployment and orchestration, Model Context Protocol servers, Claude Skills authoring, prompt engineering, model routing and cost control, local and open-weight inference, generative image, video, and 3D pipelines.
Development
WordPress, WooCommerce, Shopify, HTML/CSS, Astra and custom themes, plugin configuration, mobile-first responsive design, site migrations.
SEO
On-page optimization, JSON-LD schema markup, local landing pages across ten Central Washington markets, AI search visibility, Search Console, Analytics, Site Kit, technical audits.
Infrastructure
Hosting administration, VPS management, DNS, SSL, email configuration, backups, security hardening, cache and performance tuning.
E-Commerce
Storefront builds, product catalogs, Stripe and PayPal processing, print-on-demand fulfillment, affiliate and AdSense monetization.
Marketing
GoHighLevel CRM, Mailchimp, funnel construction, email sequences, social content strategy, review management.
Business Ops
Fixed-price scoping, client discovery, project management, post-launch training, maintenance retainers, GDPR and cookie-consent compliance, a 34-domain portfolio.
Hardware
On-site and remote computer repair, upgrades, custom PC builds, network setup and troubleshooting.

Experience

Where the hours went.

Founder & Instructor

My AI Journey — myaijourney.online

2026 – Present · Central Washington

  • Authored a three-stage AI curriculum — Understand, Use, Grow — for adult learners with no technical background, spanning eight modules from first-hour orientation through a student's first working automation.
  • Teach and support students directly through a Facebook cohort, working from the real quotes, invoices, and posts they bring rather than prepared examples.
  • Built and run the delivery platform: an open public site plus a gated membership site with accounts, saved progress, free and paid tiers, and monthly module releases.
  • Write every lesson to end in usable work, using businesses from this region — contractors, farms, retail, salons, supply houses — as the worked examples.

Owner — Web Developer & Technician

Gorden Web Design & Computer Repair

2003 – Present · Central Washington

  • Fixed-price WordPress websites for small businesses across Quincy, Ephrata, Othello, Warden, Soap Lake, Moses Lake, Ritzville, Wenatchee, and Ellensburg.
  • The whole cycle, solo: discovery, quote, mockups, build, launch, training, support.
  • Since 2025, an AI automation practice on top of that: agent deployment, MCP integrations, and custom Claude Skills built for real client systems.
  • Founded and run My AI Journey, an AI training site and community for rural small business owners.
  • SEO, schema, and analytics configured so sites rank locally from day one.
  • Hosting, domains, DNS, SSL, and VPS administration; migrations and maintenance retainers.
  • On-site and remote computer repair, upgrades, and network setup.

Data Center Operations Senior Associate

NTT DATA

April 2019 – Present · Central Washington

  • Daily operations support for enterprise data center facilities.
  • Hardware installation and lifecycle work on production equipment.
  • Site monitoring, access control, and incident escalation within enterprise change and safety procedures.

Security Officer

Securitas Security Services USA

August 2012 – April 2019 · Washington

  • Camera monitoring and access control at data center sites — moved directly into data center operations with no break in service.

IT Contractor

Advantage Technical Resourcing

December 2011 – March 2012

  • Technology lifecycle assignments with enterprise clients including Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard — deployment, imaging, hardware refresh.

Technology Helpdesk Aid & Tutor

Big Bend Community College

October 2006 – December 2008 · Moses Lake, WA

  • Tutored students one-on-one in computer coursework across a two-year appointment, meeting each student at their actual starting point rather than the one the syllabus assumed.
  • Staffed the open computer lab and technology helpdesk, resolving lab machine, campus portal, and end-user issues for both students and college staff.
  • Translated coursework and error messages into language students could act on — the same work I do now, with different subject matter.
  • Held the position while completing Cisco Networking Academy coursework (CCNA 1 & 2) at the same college, tutoring peers through material I was working through myself.

Resident Manager

Kiemle & Hagood Co.

March 2005 – November 2011 · Spokane, WA

  • Managed a HUD-subsidized senior apartment complex — leasing, marketing, resident relations, daily operations.

Download

Take it with you — a PDF of the resume.

Douglas Gorden Jr. — Resume PDF covering summary, teaching & training, AI & automation projects, technical skills, full experience timeline, and credentials. Updated September 2026. Download Resume (PDF)
Editable version The same resume as a Word document, if you need to drop it into a form or a template. Download Resume (DOCX)

Education

Where the foundation came from.

Cisco Networking Academy CertificateBig Bend Community College · CCNA 1 & 2 completed, plus Microsoft Networking coursework · 2006–2009
Associate of ArtsSpokane Community College · President, ACM chapter 2000–2001 · Computer Club Member of the Year, 1998
Microsoft Office SpecialistMOS certified
Moses Lake High SchoolDiploma, 1989 · Varsity football, All-Conference Big Nine, 2nd Team All-State

Let's Talk

Got a project, or just want to know if AI can actually help your business?

I give straight answers, including when the answer is that you don't need what you think you need.

Get a Free Quote Call 509-230-4576