About Me
I'm a software engineer and I write essays about it that make me sound like I must have accomplished something much more impressive than I actually have!15 minutes of fame
I'm more proud than I should be that my poetry has made the top of Hacker News, and every few years screenshots of my dad joke make the top of r/programmerhumor. Of course I wish instead of this people would read my boring essays, or use the incredible software that I work on, but I'll take what I can get. It's the TikTok era, what do you expect?Timeline
(If you insist on a more boring timeline, here's my résumé.)
From 2024-2025, I worked on the developer platform at Hume AI, a research lab focused on voice and AI emotional intelligence. You can read about trying to write Evals for our MCP server, or about pushing Streamlit to do what it was never intended to do for the sake of a demo project.
My favorite things I built at Hume are The Hume CLI (try it out!npx @humeai/cli tts "Hello world" --description "An angry female voice with a Scottish accent") and the "12 Days of AI" project.
From 2019-2024, I worked on the Stripe developer platform, with a focus on SDKs. I helped evolve Stripe's in-house SDK generator from a prototype that generated a couple SDKs into a complete, robust generator for all seven target languages, all while avoiding breaking users too much. My Strange Loop talk is about this project and pretending to be a compiler engineer. You can read my manifesto about breaking changes, or my hot take about "thick" vs "thin" SDKs.
From 2015-2019, I was at Vimeo/Livestream. I started as a backend API developer, but wound up leading the (internal) developer experience team. You can read "Life is Too Short for Jenkins" for a write-up of some of my struggles and regrets.
Before that, I thought I wanted to be an economist, but grad school was too hard. I did my undergrad in Computer Science and Economics at Washington and Lee University, where I met my wife, whose law career is much more interesting than mine.
Off the clock
Lately I'm interested in researching (and debating) AI ethics—particularly AI art, AI companionship, AI consciousness, and especially the position of the Catholic Church.
I play many instruments—mostly acoustic guitar lately—and occasionally write and perform comedy songs. If you have to give me a genre, it's "folk".
I presently live near Chicago, IL (in the northwest suburbs, anyway). I'm originally from the great state of South Dakota. The place I've lived the longest as an adult was New York City, though, where I spent 7 years. East coast best coast!
We have two small dogs ages and , and two kids ages and .