About
I’m a Principal Software Engineer at Permaling, a data science consulting company building Enlighten — a computational workflow platform for teams that need programmable automation over operational data. I also own Much Better Than Cats, LLC, my indie software company. I live in Munhall, PA (a suburb of Pittsburgh), and I’ve been writing about technology, programming, and whatever else is on my mind since 2006.
Day Job
At Permaling 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 the Anthropic 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 tag.
In the past, I created a product called MacSQL for managing databases on the Mac, starting with MacOS 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).
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.
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 three or four 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.