Elgin, Scotland — Originally from Portugal

Andre Sousa.
I build things
to get free.

I'm an IT professional with over a decade in the field — the high-stakes kind, supporting critical systems for UK government. That's my day job. It pays the bills. It's not the whole story.

The whole story is that I've been dealing with depression and anxiety, trying to build something of my own while holding everything else together — a career, a family, a life far from where I started. Sonia, Afonso, Beatriz. That's what this is for.

So I built. First Scorpion, then Joker — personal AI systems, running on my own hardware, doing real work. Not side projects. Lifelines. And along the way I learned I'm actually pretty good at this.

The story

Where I've been.
Where I'm going.

I left Portugal and built a life in Scotland. Good career, good family, everything you're supposed to want. But for a long time, something wasn't right — anxiety that doesn't clock out, days where just showing up takes everything you've got.

Building things helped. Not in a therapy-speak way. In a concrete way — I made this exist. It works. I did that. I started automating my life because I needed it to be easier. I started building AI tools because I couldn't afford the ones that existed. I started the Grumpy System Elf because I needed something that was mine.

The goal hasn't changed: financial freedom, on my own terms, from wherever I want to be. Not retire-to-a-beach fantasy. Just: I work because I choose to, not because I have to. I'm building toward that, one project at a time.

Things I built

Not demos.
Real things.

Grumpy System Elf 2025 → now

My brand and my exit plan. Content and digital products for IT workers who are burned out and starting to ask "is this it?" Built from nothing — the website, the content pipeline, the products, the automation behind all of it. This is how I'm buying back my time.

Joker — Personal AI System 2024 → now

A full AI assistant running on my own machine. Telegram bot, morning briefings, Gmail monitoring, autonomous product generation, social media scheduling, video pipeline, knowledge graph memory — all running locally on an RTX 3080. Zero cloud cost. Built because I needed it, not because it was a portfolio piece.

Scorpion — Cloud AI Companion 2024

The first one. A lighter AI assistant for when I'm away from the main machine — built on a NiPoGi mini PC, cloud-connected, always available. Where I learned what I was actually capable of building.

Autonomous Video Pipeline 2025

Daily short-form video generation — script, images, voice, edit, upload — with no human in the loop. Runs twice a day. Posts to YouTube, TikTok, Instagram. I don't touch it. That's the point.

Work with me

If you need someone
who's done it for real.

I built all of this while working full-time and managing everything else life throws at you. Not in ideal conditions. Not with a team. That's what you're hiring — someone who builds things that actually run.

I work on AI automation, IT infrastructure, and systems that run themselves. If you have a real problem and a real budget, I want to hear about it. Come with a brief. We'll talk about the rest.

andre@andrethegrumpysystemelf.com →
💼 LinkedIn 😤 Grumpy System Elf 📦 Products