I’m a software engineer based in San Diego, California. Since 2002, my career has included long-running consulting relationships and nine years as founding engineer of Loomly (acquired in 2025).
These days, I’m on an extended sabbatical, following my curiosity through study and building projects of my own. That’s taken me into machine learning from the math up, systems programming in Rust, and hands-on work building and shipping AI agents.
I like careful software: clear trade-offs, durable code, and systems that stay easy to change. I bring that same approach to exploring new tools and ideas.
Away from the keyboard, I’m often at another one, playing jazz piano.
Machine learning, AI engineering, and systems programming.
Building products and exploring agentic engineering workflows.
Learning 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 that generates stories and sentences from vocabulary a learner already knows. It includes audio in standard Mandarin or nine regional accents, plus spaced-repetition review. I built it for my own HSK 3 study.
TypeScript, BullMQ, text-to-speech, LLMs, Polar.sh
A chat app for flight questions. Ask about flight status, routes, or fares in plain language, and get answers alongside the conversation as flight boards, route maps, itineraries, or fare calendars. It draws on live flight data, FAA airport status, and aviation weather.
Python, FastAPI, Pydantic AI, DBOS (durable execution), React
The same approach as Mandarin Forge, applied to Spanish: stories and sentences built from the words a learner already knows, audio in standard Spanish or four regional accents, and spaced-repetition review.
TypeScript, BullMQ, text-to-speech, LLMs
A 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.
SvelteKit, Rust (axum), PostGIS, Redis
A jazz theory reference for chords, scales, and progressions in all twelve keys, with staff notation, common voicings, playback, and printable practice sheets. I first built it in 2010–2012 and rebuilt it in 2026.
Rails, Hotwire, VexFlow, Web Audio
I rebuilt my longest-running client’s application on Rails 8, moved it to infrastructure managed with Terraform, and redesigned the storefront. I also added an AI agent for administrators to find records and explore business data.
Rails, RubyLLM + pgvector, Terraform
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 similar vectors. Searching by harmony surfaces tunes with related chord changes, such as Countdown and Tune Up.
PyTorch (contrastive loss), Hugging Face
A photo gallery for Penguinoh Waddles, a well-traveled stuffed penguin photographed on location around the world. I also trained a LoRA on FLUX.2 [klein] using 52 of the gallery photos to generate new images of him, shown on the site as “Daydreams.”
Astro, FLUX.2 LoRA, Modal
