I live in the Chicago area with my wife, two boys, and two cats. I have three hobbies. Creating software pays the bills. Woodworking is the one that helps me slow down and think with my hands, small furniture projects where understanding the material matters as much as the skill. Astronomy is what I do for the community. I loved it as a kid, and I came back to it when my oldest was three and started asking questions about the sky.
I’ve been building software for over 25 years. Languages come and go, frameworks rise and fall, but what I care about doesn’t change. Software should be correct, readable, understandable, maintainable, simple, and measurable. You should be able to reason about it. Right now I’m a Principal Software Engineer at Cars.com. I spent a few years managing teams and the thing that stuck is that most problems aren’t technical. They’re about who’s talking to who and whether they need to be.
I use AI extensively at work for prototyping, gaining context into systems, and as a thinking tool. I use it to consider many different ideas quickly, and then I choose the path. I’m also an LLM skeptic. The environmental cost is real, the economics help the rich, and people who create shouldn’t have their work scraped. I think the more interesting AI work is happening outside of language models, and that’s where my attention is going.
If you’re nearby, check out naperastro.org. We host public events and try to make space a little more accessible.
You can find me on LinkedIn or GitHub. Feel free to reach out.