I've spent most of my working life as an independent software engineer. I started consulting professionally at sixteen, kept doing it through college, and built a career around long client relationships. The longest chapter was Loomly: a client project that became nine years of helping build a SaaS company from its earliest version through two acquisitions.
My parents brought home a 486 when I was eight, and I spent the next few years taking computers apart, building machines for friends, and poking at Linux. Around age thirteen I picked up a book on Perl and started programming; one of my first real projects was an online catalog for my dad's historic-newspaper business, a single Perl script backed by a CSV file. From there I worked my way into PHP and MySQL, and at sixteen I met my first paying client on the WebHostingTalk forums. Through high school I built web applications for paying clients and learned how to ship software that people depended on.
I studied Information Technology and Economics at RIT in Rochester, New York, though most of my engineering skills were self-taught, mostly from books. I found Ruby on Rails after years of writing PHP without much framework help, and it became the technical center of my work. Rochester's small Ruby community kept me in part-time consulting work through school.
After graduating I committed to consulting full time. A year later I moved to San Diego, got involved with SDRuby, and found steady work through the local Ruby scene. I usually had several clients at once, many for years at a time. Along the way I spent a year without a fixed home base, working from wherever I happened to be.
In January 2016 I got paired with a first-time founder at a local Ruby workshop night. He had an idea and a spreadsheet for managing social media posts. I took him on as a client, and that small engagement became the next nine years of my career.
That spreadsheet grew into Loomly, a social media management platform and a profitable company of twenty-five-plus people, acquired in 2021 and again in 2025. As founding engineer I stayed with it from early product work through years of Rails and infrastructure upgrades, scaling problems, team growth, and the handoff after the second acquisition. It was the longest and deepest work of my career, and I'm proud of the product and the team we built.
After the 2025 acquisition I left to take an extended learning sabbatical. I planned it as an 18-month break from normal client work: time to relearn linear algebra and calculus, work up through machine learning, deep learning, and AI engineering, and build things as I went. It also left room for Mandarin study and jazz piano.
A Mandarin-learning platform I built from scratch and run myself: around 100k lines of TypeScript, with background job processing, text-to-speech generation, LLM integration, and payments. I built it primarily for my own HSK 3 study and still use it daily.
A rebuild of my longest-running client's Rails application (powering their entire business) 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.
A text-to-image generator for a stuffed-penguin character, fine-tuning the FLUX.1-dev diffusion model with DreamBooth and LoRA. Runs locally or on A100s via Modal.
A framework for generating programming exercises with LLMs, including LoRA fine-tuning of open models and serving with vLLM.