Managing Director & AI Engineer at Cloudless Labs
I have spent two decades building scalable software systems — for enterprises, startups and small teams — the last 15 of them deep in the cloud, on AWS.
Nicolas Dao is a Sydney-based cloud and AI engineer and solo founder — Managing Director of Cloudless Labs and the founder of HappySkills and BobNinja.
Over two decades I have built enterprise e-commerce from scratch, run large-scale cloud migrations, and trained neural networks for weather forecasting and financial analysis — across media, e-commerce, marketing automation, ERP, financial services, agriculture technology and real estate.
Today I run Cloudless Labs, my own AWS & AI consulting practice, and I build HappySkills — a package manager for AI agent skills. I operate it as a company of one: engineering, design, QA, infrastructure, DevOps, security, payments, analytics, strategy and marketing.
I believe agentic programming makes a promise — that a single person, directing AI agents well, can reach a level of productivity that used to require an entire team. HappySkills is my proof: a complete, scalable, dependable platform, built and operated by one person.
Innovate. Automate. Scale.
AWS and AI consulting. Cloud migrations, cloud-native development, serverless architecture, ML pipelines, custom AI agents and agentic workflow design — delivered end-to-end. 15+ years of cloud experience.
Visit Cloudless Labs ↗The package manager for your AI agent skills.
Search, install, version, fork and publish AI agent skills conversationally — integrated directly with Claude Code. Built and operated solo, as proof that one person can run a whole platform.
Visit HappySkills ↗Delightfully quirky browser tools.
My creative playground — a growing suite of free, privacy-first tools that run 100% in your browser (WebAssembly; nothing ever leaves your device). It’s where I chase fun and creativity with the latest web tech, and design and build the whole thing through agentic programming — pushing how far a pure-browser app can go, with no backend at all.
Visit BobNinja ↗Brand-driven e-learning that engages and inspires.
The e-learning arm of Cloudless Labs, led by Lin — custom, brand-driven courses built in Storyline, Rise and Evolve that turn compliance and training into experiences people genuinely enjoy. I consult on the tech: modern web development and AI integrations.
Visit ShirleenWong.com ↗4,500+ contributions in the past year · open source since 2011
Curiosity and reinvention run in my family — so my story really starts before I was born. I’ve been chasing that same thread ever since, across Europe, Australia, the US, and now Southeast Asia.
My father fled the Vietnam War as a refugee in 1972, at twenty. The plan all along was Germany — but when he landed, he was told the country was full and put on a flight to Belgium, a place he’d never planned to set foot. Two years later, he met my mother in a chemistry class at the University of Liège, where I’d study too.
I was born in 1981 into a home where research and academia were simply the water we swam in. My mother is a blue-sky researcher at the University of Liège; my father, an applied scientist at Tarkett — and both of them studied there, at the very university I would later attend myself. I grew up loving both at once — the pure curiosity and the practical build — a duality I’ve carried into everything since.
In 1983 my sister was born — my complete opposite. I came out a confident extrovert; she, an introvert who chose calm, art, music and teaching over my restless obsession with technology and the future. Learning to move between our two worlds — and later my wife’s, another introvert — has taught me as much about people as any job ever has.
As a teenager at Collège Saint-Roch Ferrières I was obsessed with three things: filmmaking, sport and mathematics. In Belgium, only a selected few pass a national entrance exam to study civil engineering — a rare gate in Europe. I trained hard for it, sat it, and passed. The math-head had won.
At the University of Liège I chased an architect’s dream through civil engineering, drifted through aeronautics, and finally found my fit in a Master of Electrical Engineering — specialising in machine learning and computer vision. My thesis reconstructed 3D scenes from ordinary photographs.
I turned down a computer-vision role at Vivendi Universal’s Lyon game studio — one of the biggest names in the games world — for a safer, better-paid job at NorthgateArinso in Brussels. The paycheck won, and taught me early how much I still had to learn about myself.
A year of ERP and technical sales at Effigy carried me across the continent — but a hierarchy-first work culture left me looking for something freer.
I was burnt out by Europe — its morosity, and a mindset that troubled me more: little entrepreneurial passion, scant drive to build world-class technology, and far too much energy spent criticising the rest of the world instead of delivering something great. So I moved to the other side of the planet to chase a completely different dream — filmmaking.
I studied acting for a year and a half at Darlo Drama and graduated. Arriving in a new country, my real goal was to socialise and make friends — and acting delivered that, while sharpening my communication skills and teaching me how to connect with and direct actors, something I’d struggled with shooting short films. It followed the creative, free-spirited pull that has always run alongside the engineer in me.
When the money ran out, a job at Fairfax Media — the Australian Financial Review — reunited me with engineering, and Australia’s “just deliver” meritocracy finally felt like home. These early years also brought my permanent residency — a huge unlock — and, in 2014, Australian citizenship. That mattered deeply: I’m now both Belgian and Australian, and that dual identity is a big part of who I am.
Director of Technology at Quivers, a US e-commerce startup — leading teams in Australia and India and flying back and forth to the States, including an unforgettable fortnight in New Delhi training our team there in person. Five formative years of shipping, customer development and design thinking — sharpened at Lean Startup Machine, Pollenizer and Founder Institute — where I fell hard for entrepreneurship.
I struck out on my own with Neap, helping first-time founders with lean and design thinking. It failed — wrong audience, wrong offer — but it taught me deep respect for sales, marketing and the craft of running a business. It’s also where I met my wife, Lin.
I rebuilt from the lessons. Cloudless Labs serves teams who value hard-won experience, from SMEs to funded enterprises. Seven years and counting.
After COVID, my wife Lin — Indonesian, and homesick — moved home to Bali for good. From there she runs shirleenwong.com, our e-learning venture within Cloudless Labs — and runs it very successfully. I’ve split my life between Sydney and Bali ever since: most of my time in Sydney, a lot of it in Bali. Travel has always been the point.
For twenty years I’ve had more ideas than time. Agentic AI changes that — one person can now build and run what used to take a team. It’s already how I build HappySkills and BobNinja, and I’ve never been more excited to ship — bringing my clients along for the ride.
