JESSE MITCHELL · NORTHERN VIRGINIA
Runner. Musician. Maker of useful things.
Usually with coffee.
Welcome to HouseBlend Aspie, my little corner of the Internet. I work in the legal field, play piano at church, and spend much of my spare time running, building, and asking questions.
Explore my projects Why HouseBlend Aspie?01 / WHAT KEEPS ME CURIOUS
Different interests. Plenty of overlap.
I’m a distance runner, marathoner, Boston Marathon qualifier, and UESCA Certified Running Coach and Endurance Sports Nutrition Coach.
At HouseBlend Running Company, I write about training, racing, and sports nutrition, with a particular interest in what the evidence actually says. Questionable supplement claims occasionally get the parody treatment.
HouseBlend Running CompanyMusic has been part of my life for a long time. These days, that usually means spending weekends accompanying the Contemporary Choir at All Saints Catholic Church in Manassas, Virginia.
It’s a different kind of practice, and an important part of my week.
All Saints Contemporary ChoirI enjoy figuring out how computers work, and how they break. Cybersecurity is a hobby: I learn through ethical, authorized exercises in Hack The Box’s deliberately vulnerable labs.
I also tinker with Linux, self-hosting, networking, programming, privacy, and generative AI. There’s always another rabbit hole.
My Hack The Box profileScience and skepticism connect a lot of my interests. I’m fascinated by the difference between a good explanation and one that merely sounds convincing.
Evidence, probability, logical fallacies, and pseudoscience all provide plenty to think about. The Internet gives us extraordinary access to information, and equally extraordinary ways to misunderstand it. I find both fascinating.
02 / THINGS I’VE BUILT
Sometimes there wasn’t. So I made one.
A web application I built to help Virginia magistrates organize information and calculate facility distances when applying the statutory 50-mile rule for temporary detention orders.
Designed around the geographic calculations involved in Virginia Code §§ 37.2-810 and 16.1-340.2.
Visit TDO HelperIndependent personal project. Not endorsed by the Office of the Executive Secretary of the Supreme Court of Virginia. Magistrates remain responsible for applying the governing law and the facts of each case.
An AI-assisted running coach built for my own training. A self-hosted bridge connects my Strava workout history with ChatGPT, so coaching conversations can draw on actual training data.
Originally a Custom GPT, the bridge has evolved into an MCP server. It’s an ongoing experiment in a practical question: can AI actually be useful?
A metronome born from a practical problem at church: keeping time without adding an audible click to a rehearsal or performance.
A prominent full-screen pulse makes the beat easy to follow on a nearby phone. Traditional audio cues are there when sound is useful, too.
03 / BEHIND THE NAME
House blend + Aspie.
It almost rhymes. Close enough.
HouseBlend Aspie isn’t a brand I invented for this website. It’s the name I’ve used online for years.
I was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder in my early 30s. Finally having a name for something that had shaped so much of my life helped me understand myself. Being autistic is part of who I am, and I’m proud of that. I even have AN ASPIE on my license plate.
When I needed an online identity, I wanted it to reflect that part of me, along with another fact fundamental to my existence: coffee.
“HouseBlend Aspie” was a play on “house blend coffee.” If you don’t examine it too closely, it almost, sort of, kind of rhymes. The name stuck. HouseBlend Running Company became a natural extension of the same theme.
And this is its home.
04 / AROUND THE WEB
The professional, the personal, and the running-related.