I’m a Principal Software Engineer at JotVision, an AI platform company working in data operations and robotics. I’m in charge of Enlighten, the programmable automation over operational data that provides the core of their products.

I also own Much Better Than Cats, LLC, my indie software company.

I am Autistic. I wasn’t diagnosed until I was 51. I spent my whole life feeling awkward, never understanding social cues/norms, and losing touch with people I’d met or been friends with. Since my diagnosis, my mental health and life have improved greatly.

I live in Munhall, PA, a suburb of Pittsburgh, and I’ve been writing here about technology, programming, and whatever else is on my mind since 2006.

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Day Job

At JotVision we have fewer than a dozen engineers on Enlighten, which means “principal” covers a lot of ground: I write Rust, design the architecture, author the technical proposals, review all backend PRs, and own several major subsystems end to end. I’m also a heavy user of Claude Code and Anthropic’s models.

Enlighten lets teams build automated, multi-step workflows in Python, JavaScript, and SQL — scheduled, webhook-triggered, and monitored through an operator dashboard. It runs on customer infrastructure (GCP, AWS, on-prem) for organizations where data residency matters. The backend is Rust throughout; the frontend is Angular. Workflows execute in the browser via Pyodide and DuckDB for interactive development, and on the server via Deno for production — same APIs in both contexts.

Indie Dev

My current project at Much Better Than Cats is Alcove, a native ebook library manager for Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Think of it as what iTunes was for music — but for ebooks, built for Apple platforms, and designed for people who own hundreds of books across multiple stores and formats. I’ll be writing about it here as it develops — see the Alcove category.

In the past, I created a product called MacSQL for managing databases on the Mac, starting with Mac OS 8 well into OS X’s lifetime. I also wrote a few games, including a word search for iPad and a mobile game for girls to create paper dolls (written for and sold by a friend of mine).

My first Mac project was a Hearts game I wrote in 1993 using Think C on a Mac Plus. I had taken a CS class on the C language where my project was a CLI version of Hearts on the school’s Unix servers, which I then ported to the Mac.

I was proud of it at the time. Games were not allowed on the school’s computers, but since mine was a class project, it was allowed. I remember getting an email from the Dean of the Foreign Relations college thanking me for the game and reporting a few bugs.

I was really impressed when I tried the Mac version on a department Mac II and the window scaled properly to the larger screen and was in 4-bit color!

Background

I started programming on the Apple II+ in elementary school and was soon auditing junior college COBOL classes on VAX systems. My parents wouldn’t buy me a compiler, so I took a detour through magazine layout and photography in college while minoring in Computer Science and building websites. In 1994 I converted content from QuarkXPress to HTML for Time Warner’s original Pathfinder website, and built an online store for a magazine before HTTPS, Netscape Navigator, or JavaScript existed.

I grew up in Orange, Texas and have lived in the DC and NYC metro areas, and Morgantown, WV at various points. I lived two blocks away from Ground Zero on 9/11, and that night I wrote down everything I had seen while it was still fresh. It got emailed around and reprinted in a couple of newspapers, and it’s here as A Story of Disaster.

Gaming & Conventions

I’m a lifelong gamer. Patricia Stephens and I have been together since shortly after I moved to Pittsburgh in 2021. We own over 100 board and card games — Ticket to Ride, Cards Against Humanity, and many others see regular play. I’m currently running a D&D 5e campaign and 3D-print and paint miniatures for it. Video games get played on my gaming PC and PS5.

Outside of code, Trish and I go to concerts two or three times a month, host regular game nights, and spend a lot of time with our chosen family. Trish is a huge horror movie fan, so a few weekends a year we make the rounds at conventions like Horror Realm in Pittsburgh and Cinema Wasteland in Cleveland.