I’m a software developer by training and occupation, although my career hasn’t exactly been a straight line. I have also been a teacher and entrepreneur.

I’m passionate about a lot of subjects. Over the years, I’ve increasingly made my work available, but outside of my day jobs, I haven’t historically produced large completed projects. I’ll be charitable and describe my output as varied, rather than unfocused or sporadic :). This page attempts to catalog the writing and other works I’m most proud of.

I’ve got a fantastic family, which includes my wife, Jen, and our kids: Natalie, Julia, Claire, and Evan.

I currently work for Branch as Head of Data Office.

Features

Along with individual posts, this site contains some featured series:

• A Former Teacher’s Story: the journal of my brief teaching career in Baltimore City Public Schools, through Teach For America.
• Our Financial Planning Voyage: the journal of my process of getting my family’s financial plan in place.

Appearances

• ZSA, makers of my Moonlander keyboard, interviewed me to talk about my office setup.
• I was a Jeopardy! contestant, appearing on February 18 & 19, 2021. I achieved my life goal of winning a match!
  

• Through my role as an Engineering Manager at Better.com, I was interviewed by The Muse in 2020.
• I presented at Scalar Conference 2017 in Warsaw, Poland.
• my childhood friend Aaron Mayo interviewed me on his podcast, The Millennial Black Dad.
• An interview with me appeared on the /dev/color blog, an organization that I helped bring to New York.
• I participated in a /dev/color Q&A Session, hosted by Quora.
• I spoke about GraphQL on the Ladybug Podcast.

Projects and Pieces

• I wrote several pieces for Artsy’s engineering blog:
  • Is GraphQL The Future?
  • Git Reverts: Rolling Forward While Rolling Back
  • Professional Development at Artsy Engineering
  • The Tech Behind Live Auction Integration
• I wrote a piece on how to improve hiring in engineering when I worked at HuffPost.
• During brief time as a teacher, I managed to mostly keep up a journal of my experience, which remains the most significant writing project of my life.
• At one point, I was cofounder of a startup called Breakrs, which was a social network for music discovery built around a fantasy sports-inspired game dynamic. We were finalists of the 2013 NYU Stern Entrepreneur’s Challnge. Unfortunately, there’s not much left of Breakrs to show, but it was a pivotal experience for me, in many ways.
• I’ve become pretty avid about home automation, and you can read about one of my more involved projects, how I linked two ceiling fans to my SmartThings setup.
• While at NYU, I published a conference paper on a project my colleagues and I built to simulate reverb in physical spaces.
• I composed an avant garde electronic music piece I’m pretty proud of, called Wanderers.
• I’m an avid traveller, and at one point, I did a decent job of writing about my trips.

Presences

• I’m an avid Tweeter. I initially felt like it was a bit of a black hole, but once I got my follows right, it’s a big part of how I engage with the world.
• I just joined Mastodon, and I am attempting to replace my use of Twitter with it
• I’m a big fan of Stack Overflow, which I consider to be one of the greatest things to have ever happened for software developers.
• I comment frequently on Hacker News.
• I’ve been a minor contributor to open source projects over the years, which you can find on my GitHub profile.
• I do occasionally post things to Facebook for public consumption. If you know me personally, feel free to friend me.
• I write on Medium, but mostly in response to other people’s writings.
• You can find me on LinkedIn, although I don’t publish much there.
• I occasionally answer questions on Quora.

Roles

• I’m a Democratic committeeperson for my local district in the Middlesex County Democratic Organization.