A timeline of the more interesting things I've worked on. Most of the time I've collaborated with others, because it's more fun that way.
Freelance. Cooking up what's next.
Head of Engineering. Building at the intersection of generative AI and creative practice.
Working in digital assistant tech. Natural language understanding, task completion, developer tooling, and more. Shipped services critical to the Portal product.
Engineer #1.5. Built a platform and a digital assistant from the ground up — from data, to knowledge, to natural language understanding, intent fulfillment, to end user product on iOS and the web. Acquired by Facebook in August 2017.
Led a team of 16 inside Mozilla's Cloud Services, responsible for critical cloud infrastructure that tied together many Mozilla products. Evolved the Firefox Sync feature, built Firefox Accounts, and grew Mozilla Persona. Helped form the initial concept behind Open Web Apps, which became Firefox Marketplace.
Developed Mozilla Persona from specification to a service with millions of users. The project proved authentication can simultaneously be more secure, privacy preserving, and more usable. Helped hire 16 souls to create the Identity group.
A node.js library that uses event-loop latency to determine when requests should be blocked — making it easy to develop graceful failure modes.
A node.js library that integrates directly with V8 to make discovery and monitoring of memory leaks easier. Advanced HeapDiff feature simplifies leak isolation.
A hacker-friendly PaaS for rapid deployment of early stage node.js services on Amazon Web Services.
CSS selectors for slicing through complex JSON structures. A spec, a reference implementation, and a cool interactive demo. People got excited and ported it everywhere.
An experiment in building an HTML5 runtime for desktop apps. Working with Marcio Galli and the community, we built a functional SDK for packaging web content into standalone desktop apps on three platforms.
Led the team of four that created Yahoo! BrowserPlus — a plugin platform featured in Yahoo! Mail used by a hundred million users. Built P2P libraries in C++ from scratch implementing TURN, STUN, and ICE. Developed many C++ reusables for client teams across Yahoo.
Made it easy to distribute, version, and develop scriptable cross-platform web plugins. With a team of four we designed and built the platform and tens of services, ultimately used by hundreds of millions of people on Yahoo! Mail.
In 2007 there were no good native JSON parsers. YAJL is a highly optimized streaming JSON parser in ANSI C — the expat of JSON. Made infamous during the Twitpocalypse.
First technical hire. Built a peer-to-peer platform to let users access their content wherever they are. Desktop product in ANSI C ran natively on OS X, Windows, Linux, and embedded systems. Mobile products on J2ME, Symbian, and other primitive platforms. Licensed the technology to Yamaha. Acquired by Yahoo in late 2004.
Change detection for the 90s web. Turned a custom C database library into a SQL database daemon serving millions of users daily. Learned about query optimization, indexing, data storage — and being held accountable for it in the middle of the night. Acquired by PUMA Technologies in 2000.