For twenty years the whole game was getting a machine to notice you. Then the machines learned to read, started answering questions themselves, and quietly stopped caring about your keywords. I help people get found in that world — and I think the change is the best thing that's happened to writing in a long time.
About
I'm Jaabel — Dominican kid, Boston-made, Orlando-based, with a Texas layover I still think about every time it snows somewhere else. I studied electronic engineering, which is a fancy way of saying I spent my twenties taking things apart to find out why they lied to me.
My résumé reads like a man who couldn't sit still: junior engineer, web engineer, software security engineer at Twitter, then running a command center for the Texas Department of Transportation — the room where the phones ring when the highway is on fire. After that, customer retention at Spectrum, which is the single most educational job I've ever had, because nothing teaches you how humans actually make decisions like listening to a stranger explain, in detail, why they're leaving you.
Here's the thread through all of it: I've spent my career on the seam between a system and the person yelling at it. Security is that. Incident response is that. Retention is definitely that. And search — the thing I do now — is the biggest version of it, because search is just a machine trying to guess what a human meant and usually getting it 70% right.
What I actually do
AI Search Optimizer. It sounds made up. It half is. The job is this: language models and AI answer engines are now the front door to most information, and they don't rank pages the way Google did — they read, summarize, and decide whether you're worth citing. So I make people, products, and pages legible to them. Clear structure. Honest claims. Machine-readable markup. Sentences that survive being compressed into someone else's answer.
The uncomfortable part, and the reason I like this work: you can't fake it anymore. The old SEO game rewarded volume and tricks. This one rewards actually knowing something and saying it plainly. Turns out the optimal strategy for the robots is the same one your grandmother recommended — be clear, be useful, don't lie.
Off the clock
I hike, mostly so I can sit on a rock and stare at something older than every opinion I've ever had. I go to fights. I cook, and I will argue about mangú with anyone brave enough. I read too much and sleep slightly too little.
Also: my domain says Jaabel and my repo says Jaabl, because I typed it wrong once and decided I'd rather ship it than fix it. Consider that a fair preview of my whole philosophy.
Writing
Notes on search, retrieval, and how to write things both people and machines will bother to finish. Read the blog or subscribe by RSS — no newsletter, no popup begging for your email, no course.
Contact
If you want your work to be the thing the machines quote, or you just want to argue about mangú: Jaabel@pm.me. I answer real emails.