Obie Fernandez (NL)

Obie Fernandez bought his first turntables at fourteen with a summer of wages from an Army Navy store in New Jersey. He started producing electronic music in 2001. By 2018 music had become a serious, almost full-time hobby and he began touring as a DJ. In 2019 he and his music business partner launched their own record label, and that year he played festivals including EDC and A State of Trance Festival while hosting a weekly two-hour radio show. He founded RCRDSHP in 2021. Electronic artists used the platform to sell limited-edition digital collectibles to their fans, generating millions of dollars in sales.

Obie has been a professional software developer since 1998. He wrote The Rails Way and founded Hashrocket, one of the best-known Ruby on Rails shops of its time. His more recent book, Patterns of Application Development Using AI, shows developers how to build products on large language models. Today he is CTO of ZAR, a stablecoin fintech serving emerging markets, where he builds software with autonomous AI agents.

In the studio he works in Ableton Live with Juan Rendon, his creative partner of nearly ten years. Since 2024 AI generation has been part of how they brainstorm new track ideas and generate vocal parts. Obie's own role has moved toward songwriting and executive production, mirroring the changes that AI coding agents brought to his programming work.

His latest creative AI project is Saindra, a latin pop singer that has drawn a large following after going viral with a number of so-called "slopcore" videos.