Patrick
Carmichael
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Lately, those stories are about programmatic ad yield, CTV inventory, and the silent, invisible pipelines of the Model Context Protocol. The infrastructure is not the point. The point is what moves through it.
Patrick Carmichael has spent fifteen years inside the apparatus that decides what you see, when you see it, and how much it costs. He builds two kinds of things: the systems that connect premium video supply to programmatic demand, and the tools that help engineers talk to machines in ways that actually work. Everything else is story.
Ad Tech / CTV
At FreeWheel, Comcast’s ad technology arm, Patrick navigates the massive, shifting architecture of modern television. His accounts are the platforms that have remade the living room - Roku, Samsung, TCL, Bloomberg - each a different country with a different language, different laws about what an impression is worth.
The work is translation, migration, and negotiation: moving publisher inventory onto modern SSP and MPP architectures, designing marketplaces where yield and demand find something like equilibrium. It is infrastructure work, and infrastructure is invisible until it breaks. Then you find out exactly who built it and whether they built it well.
.contexts LLC
Through .contexts LLC, Patrick runs a quiet engineering house. The work: mapping semantic memory into knowledge graphs that persist across sessions, wiring local execution loops in Python, FastAPI, and Docker, building Model Context Protocol servers that let language models reach into the tools and data a team already has.
Every engagement starts with a workflow audit - a cold look at what a team actually does versus what it thinks it does - and ends with a deployed system the team actually uses. The goal is not automation for its own sake. The goal is to stop wasting time on the things machines can do, so people can do the things they actually should.