Hi! A bit about me:
Generally, my interests lie at the intersection of AI, writing, engineering, design, and knowledge tools:
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Recent work: I started and built most of Holloway, a small startup that has rebuilt the digital book publishing process with dozens of in-depth, web-based guides in entrepreneurship, creativity, and personal growth. We also publish print books. I love to talk to authors, experts, and anyone who cares about sharing high-value knowledge.
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Startups and entrepreneurship: I've been a founding engineer a few times and a founder. I like working with founders and sometimes advise startups. I wrote the most widely read guide to equity compensation in startups.
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Writing: I've written and edited few popular guides (2M+ readers), including the equity compensation guide, The Art of Command Line (with 150K+ stars one of the top 40 most popular GitHub repos of all time), and AWS. I’ve also edited (and published) about a dozen books by other authors.
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Coding: I've loved programming since I was a kid. I have been a founding engineer and engineering leader at several startups in AI, SaaS, and web search, some failed, some successful (backend/distributed sysems, full stack web/JS/Node/TypeScript/React, Python, Java, C/C++, and older esoteric things like Lisp and Prolog). Also devops—AWS has given me the honor of being an "AWS Hero."
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Tech: I’ve worked on conversational AI systems since early days with the original Siri team at SRI. I’ve built search engines with prominent ex-Google engineers. I have a broad interest in the theory, the practice, and the human elements of software engineering, and the history of software and AI.
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Inspiration: I believe the purpose of technology is to improve our collective knowledge and intelligence and to solve human problems. The technologist I most admire is Doug Engelbart. His work is as relevant today as it was 50 years ago. By sharing a vision of what was possible, he shaped how we use software for decades. I feel privileged to have met him a few times.
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Random: I aspire to know a few things about many topics and many things about a few topics. When younger, I thought I would be a professor. I majored in physics, math, and computer science and did my graduate work in math at Berkeley. My interests include good books of all kinds, current culture and politics but in historical context, philosophy, psychology, startups and entrepreneurship, AI (both old school and latest gen AI explosion), product design, typography, software engineering, obscure programming languages, logic and foundations of mathematics, mental and physical health (and their interactions), fitness and nutrition, trail running and wilderness backpacking, natural history (especially of the California mountains and deserts), fingerstyle guitar, 15th-18th century lute music, early American blues, Brazilian Portuguese, truth, kindness, and some other arcana.
Find me:
Please say hello if you think you should! I'd be glad to hear from you if we share interests. :)