I live in south Mississippi and I build things

I’m Bryan Cirlot. I live in south Mississippi with my wife, Anna, and our kids on fourteen acres we’ve come to call Redemption Square.

It’s an old place. It once kept horses and pecan trees; now it keeps a couple of Great Pyrenees, sheep, goats, chickens, ducks, a pond full of fish, and a list of things that need fixing that has never once gotten shorter. Anna and I have been on the Gulf Coast the better part of four decades, so this is home in the sense of actually living somewhere rather than merely having an address.

I planted Church At The Square and I pastor it. That’s the center of the week: preaching Scripture, teaching, sitting with people, training leaders, and trying to build something healthy that outlasts me. I’m Reformed Baptist — 1689 Federalist, if you want the specific version — and I’ve grown up in and served SBC churches my whole life. I love the cooperation and missions of the SBC and I love the robustness of the Reformed tradition, and I’ve never understood why I’m supposed to pick one.

Somewhere along the way the tinkering turned into a trade. I started Salt Marsh Digital to build websites and software for businesses, churches, and people who needed the internet to do something useful for them. ekkle.app came out of that — a church platform built by someone who has actually had to keep the records a church has to keep.

I also get to teach pastors overseas from time to time, which is one of the better things I do with a passport.

Lately most of my spare attention goes to AI: local models, coding agents, what happens to software development when the computer starts acting less like a tool and more like a collaborator. I’m still working that out. Nobody has this figured out yet, whatever the confident people say.

The collection looks strange written down — a pastor who configures Linux servers, a developer who worries about sheep. It makes more sense if you assume the common thread is curiosity: build what needs building, tend what needs tending, and try to understand how the thing actually works.