About Me

The views expressed here are my own and not those of my employer.

This is my professional online presence, so I won’t share much outside of my engineering work, but in my free time I like to play my guitar & Octatrack, travel, cook, read, and generally enjoy being an aerobic organism hurtling thru space on this beautiful rock.

My focus

  • I am forever learning to write elegant & performant systems with a minimum amount of incidental complexity.
  • These days most of the code I write professionally is in TypeScript. I did a lot of time in the PHP mines. SQL is my favorite except when it’s not. In my free time I experiment with Clojure & Rust. I’ve always wanted a reason to use Erlang.
  • I have learned from so many wonderful authors and bloggers– I am trying to pay that forward by blogging here. If you’re new in your career or just graduated a bootcamp and have questions that would benefit from my expository style, please send them my way.

Some past doings

  • When I was in high-school in New England I started playing with Linux, and met someone my age in the UK who was writing a text editor using Gtk, named gedit. I added tabbed MDI, autoindent, some plugins, & managed releases as a co-maintainer of the project. During this time the Gnome project adopted it as their official text editor.
  • From high-school until I went to college in my early twenties I worked at an Internet Service Provider, where I did UNIX System Admin work & developed e-commerce websites on a number of unique technologies. I also wrote an internal ticketing system for tracking repeatable multi-step workflows when onboarding new clients.
  • After college I wrote SQL and ETL jobs, extracting relevant info from corporate data warehouses and preparing it for display in various reporting dashboards.
  • From creating a music-data mashup, a retweet somehow led to an introduction to the folks at Svpply. There I worked on pixel-perfect implementations of new features, an onboarding recommendation system & a 3rd-party embeddable widget. It was a short-lived but important learning experience– I worked with some very talented people, & I met Jack Rusher who introduced me to Clojure & provided valuable mentorship.
  • At ITG I took over the development of the front and backend components of a realtime streaming platform for visualization of trade execution. Traders sending executions thru our platform were able to visualize the performance of our VWAP/TWAP & list-based algorithms. This was my first exposure to a systems programming & performance-focused way of thinking, & now I’m addicted to it.
  • At Bloomberg I have worked on the Instant Bloomberg messaging platform, with a focus on performance optimizations and platform extensibility.

Papers I Love

Books I Love