About my work

11.07.24

My work is the creation of technologies to increase individual agency in society.

Scalable Machine Learning (early 2010s)

My entry into software design was through the sciences, where I was a research assistant at the Neuroimaging Lab at the Beckman Institute. The biosciences had a need for analytics on a scale not seen before which led me to specialize in large scale data processing. Ultimately, I decided to walk away from an academic career, but this specialization brought me into the discipline of what was often called “Big Data” at the time.

I worked on many large scale data processing systems. The most notable were Neustar’s UltraDNS (which hosted about 1/3 of the world’s DNS traffic at the time) and the first scalable machine learning team inside Yahoo. This work was incredibly ambitious and had only been done at Google, Facebook and Baidu. We were able to train machine learning models for Yahoo’s Ad recommender system with hundreds of millions of parameters.

Tools For Thought (2015-2017)

I also was part of a program at Yahoo based on Google’s APM program, which Marissa Mayer had brought over. It was here I met my co-founders for what would be called Deco Software. Deco’s mission was to give designers full control over the user interface. As we saw it, modifying a visual artifact and then passing that on to engineers to implement by eye was the source of many problems in software design, but in order to give designers a direct link to the code we needed a new paradigm. That paradigm turned out to be React and React Native. At Deco, we created an open-source React Native editor with dynamic preview and visual control over the UI elements. We hosted React Native meetups across the globe. We worked together with Facebook’s React team to suggest core improvements. A great deal of our design inspiration was sourced from Bret Victor and his Dynamicland, which I was able to visit in Oakland. As part of our work, we partnered with Airbnb who soon after offered us to join the company. We accepted this in order to give our ideas time for incubation outside of venture-funded pressures.

Designing the Gestalte (2017-2021)

The Deco team worked alongside Airbnb’s world class design system’s team. The team’s charter was practical information tooling combined with forward looking research. I worked with amazing people and can honestly say all the work was a joint effort. A big focus of the team’s research was moving generative design forward.

A year earlier, I had became roommates with a dynamic young graphic designer who had recently immigrated to the US. Overtime we forged an alliance to develop a new gestalt design style inspired by circular design and prior humanist design movements. This turned into a design agency we called gestalte. While gestalte never truly got off the ground, we did some work with companies like ABB as well as collaborations with great people, like typeface designers at &Walsh.

During the pandemic, gestalte released a playful art object called Zine Machine which was featured in online publications and Hacker News.

Universal Basic Architecture (2019-2021)

San Francisco in the decade of the 2010s experienced rapidly increasing wealth inequality. This jarring dissonance alongside my awareness of the approaching advancements in artificial intelligence brought me to the ideas of Universal Basic Income. However, I believe there is a high risk of UBI to exacerbate unhealthy power dynamics in society. This led me to experiment with a new idea I still have yet to finish exploring. This idea was called Universal Basic Architecture. I would like to write more about this, but that’s for another time.

The idea was to combine the gestalt design principles with digital manufacturing tools. We could design low-marginal cost self-replicating machines and release them into communities of need. These machines would produce the basic needs (food, energy, clothing, housing, etc.) However, rather than starting with the designs, I wanted to see what would happen when individuals had value producing machines already in hand for almost no cost. This is how Willow Common Studio was born, a radically free and open art and design collective based in West Oakland. The program ran for 2 years and then was shutdown. It was an incubation space for several local artists and creators, who I believe would prefer to remain unnamed.

Cryptography Games (2022-Present)

After shutting down Willow Common Studio, I flew to London to join a program called Entrepreneur First. It was here I met my now co-founder, Baz. My philosophical contribution to the mission of our company Tonk is really rooted in how a program like Universal Basic Architecture is both a design challenge and a coordination challenge. My belief is the design challenge is deceptively straightforward. The coordination challenges of today, however, have no simple answers. We all sense the potential danger here. So I was drawn to crypto and the generational leap in cryptography to address present day coordination challenges.

Tonk began its life as a skunkworks project using fully on-chain games as a playground for advanced cryptography. You can read about the mission of Tonk and find links to our prior work here.