I'm a software engineer based in San Diego, California, currently on an extended learning sabbatical spent studying a broad range of technical topics, from machine learning to systems programming. I've been consulting since 2002, with long-running client relationships and then nine years as founding engineer of Loomly.
I like careful software: clear trade-offs, durable code, and systems that stay easy to change.
Outside work I play jazz piano. Earlier in my career, I shaped my work around travel; these days I'm more settled.
Machine learning, AI engineering, and systems programming.
Following AI closely and trying new developer tools.
Studying Mandarin Chinese, currently working through HSK 3.
Playing twice a month in a house band at a San Diego jam session.
A Mandarin-learning platform I built from scratch and run myself. It generates stories and sentences from the vocabulary a learner already knows, with audio in standard Mandarin or nine regional accents and spaced-repetition review. I built it primarily for my own HSK 3 study.
A chat app for flight questions. Ask in plain words about status, delays, departure boards, nonstop routes, mileage, or fares, and the answer comes back as a view next to the chat: a flight board, a route map, an itinerary, a fare calendar. It draws on live flight data, FAA airport status, and aviation weather.
The same approach as Mandarin Forge, applied to Spanish: stories built from the words a learner already knows, audio in standard Spanish or four regional accents, and spaced-repetition review.
A private, map-first archive for Foursquare and Swarm check-in history. Upload an account export to map and search every check-in, replay journeys, and view calendar heatmaps and photos. Profiles are private by default.
A jazz theory reference for chords, scales, and progressions in all twelve keys, each written out on the staff with common voicings, playback, and printable practice sheets. I first built it in 2010–2012 and rebuilt it in 2026.
A rebuild of my longest-running client's Rails application onto Rails 8 and modern terraformed infrastructure, plus a full redesign of the storefront. Done largely pro bono, partly as a way to explore the current generation of coding agents.
An embedding model for jazz chord progressions: a small transformer trained with contrastive learning over ~6,900 standards, so a tune and its transpositions map to the same vector. Searching by harmony surfaces contrafacts like Countdown and Tune Up.
A photo gallery for Penguinoh Waddles, a well-traveled stuffed penguin, with every photo taken on location. I also trained a LoRA on FLUX.2 [klein] from 52 of the gallery photos to generate new images of him, which the site shows as Daydreams.
