I’m a software leader in Greater Boston. I taught myself to code at 13, writing Clipper and Turbo C programs and TSRs on DOS, and I haven’t stopped since. Over 30 years that’s taken me from the Windows SDK, Visual C++ and device drivers through C# and .NET, to Ruby, PHP and Python. On the front end it’s been everything from jQuery to React and Angular, I’ve built mobile apps since Windows CE, and I’ve done a lot of data science and machine learning along the way. These days my focus is on getting the most out of AI agents, using them to unlock greater productivity for software teams.

A few years ago I wrote a Programmer Competency Matrix which has been popular. In 2012, I took part in a NFC/Android Hackathon and was ranked #3 for my app LokoChat which lets you create HyperLocal chat rooms. I made my first open source contribution in 2011 to Python and more specifically CPython. I was a Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Microsoft in 2005 for my contributions to the .Net and C# community. Recently I’ve been advising HackerRank as part of their Skills Advisory Council.

Most of my career has been at startups: building products, hiring and running the engineering teams behind them, and owning the infrastructure they run on. That’s meant colo cages and VMware earlier on, and AWS and Azure today. Security has been a constant thread too: I take part in CTF tournaments and do reverse engineering work. I use Windows, macOS and Linux side by side most days. My LinkedIn profile has the details.

AI agents are changing how software gets built faster than anything I’ve seen, and I’m having a lot of fun with it: I can get 10x more done than before. I’m a little sad that I barely need to write code by hand anymore, but the trade is worth it. Agents let me build custom, bespoke tools that streamline much of my own work.