About
Full stack engineer, musician, and birdwatcher based in Lewiston, ME.
I spent about a year completely offline — no LinkedIn, no blog, no social media. Late 2023 through the end of 2024. An intentional disconnect. I'm back to building in the open.
I build infrastructure tooling, contribute to compilers and languages, hack on hardware, and maintain a lot of FOSS.
Tech & FOSS
Sponsoring
Recent Posts
Hacking around with XGS-PON: Fiber ISPs, WAS-110 Modules & Mikrotik
Two fiber ISPs, one switch, two BFW WAS-110 SFP+ XGS-PON modules running 8311 community firmware. Fidium and GoNetSpeed both authenticate the same way (clone the operator-supplied ONT's identity into IaC), but their upstream OLTs push very different OMCI service profiles. This is the procedure I used to land both, with annotated scripts and OMCI captures.
Little Zig Libraries for Fruit-Shaped Escape Hatches
Four tiny Zig libraries, one small thesis: keep the app shell pleasant on macOS, but move native capabilities behind a boring C ABI so Linux ports do not become full rewrites.
Smol DarwinNicUtil Has Docs and installers now, yay
DarwinNicUtil v2.1.2 is documented, packaged on PyPI and FlakeHub, and now reflects the Mac-bastion OOB flow I use to manage lab network hardware.
Host Characterization with Chapel, Fancy Testing & Dhall
Using Chapel's forall, my own property-based testing library and Gabby's Dhall lang for characterization records on a dual-socket Xeon machine, lets do some awesome kernel scheduling analysis
Week Notes: Indeterminism, Passkeys, and Spring
Determinism begets fascination with indeterminism. FIDO2 work for cmux, qutebrowser & keepassxc, a 2026 teletype, 20km spring run, lead climbing, and the BCI server rack draws a concerning 4kWh at idle.
GitHub Activity
Repository Similarity Graph
Jaccard similarity of repository language distributions
Experience
Systems Analyst (DevSecOps) — Bates College
2024–Present
- Legacy modernization, bespoke Ansible extensions, roles & plugins
- Apache Solr, ACME cert management, SAML integrations
- GitLab AutoDevOps, RKE2 + Rancher, promoter of IaC practices
- Orchestration, packaging & tooling work (Haskell + Python, QuickCheck, Cabal, FPM)
CV/ML Software Engineer — Macaulay Library
2018–2022
- Developed & launched Merlin Sound ID & The Machine Learning Blog
- Fine-grained ML annotation tools for audio classification
- Internal classification & model evaluation web APIs
- Python (TensorFlow, NumPy, Pandas), Flask, TypeScript, Docker, WASM
Fabrication Lab Manager — Cornell CALS
2021–2022
- Rapid fabrication curricula for Landscape Architecture students & faculty
- OpenSCAD, Fusion 360, C++ tiler development
Ventures
Tinyland.dev, Inc
2024–Present — Agent orchestration platform for semiautonomous infrastructure lifecycle management in higher education. Bootstrapped, source-available.
xoxd.ai
2024–Present — ML/AI research arm of Tinyland. Bespoke SLM development, property-based testing of agent systems, multi-cloud federation research.
Columbari.us LLC
2017–2021 — Independent Gov. contractor in GIS & ML.
Moonlight Coworking LLC
2021–2024 — HPC hackerspace initiative in NY; shelved due to move to Maine.
Kitten Spit Labs
2022–Present — Ultrasonic phantom network gel synthesis. Currently on mfg. pause.
Clients
FOSS
Original Projects
Languages & Compilers
quickchpl
Property-Based Testing for Chapel
RemoteJuggler
Multi-identity git credential resolver in Chapel
pixelwise-research
WebGPU glyph compositor demo in Futhark
Infrastructure & DevOps
GloriousFlywheel
Recursive IaC flywheel for GitLab
Ansible-DAG-Harness
LangGraph DAG harness for Ansible iteration cycles
searchies
SearXNG infrastructure with Caddy & OpenTofu
Hardware & Maker
XoxdWM
Eye-gesture VR & BCI XWayland Emacs WM
TurkeyProbe
ESP8266 thermistor probe with WebSocket UI
hiberpower-ntfs
ASM2362 NVMe FTL corruption recovery research
Web & Apps
tetrahedron
Mental health social service application
timberbuddy
Control package for Amish sawmill robotics
FastPhotoAPI
Flask image server with Lanczos resampling
ML & Data
Contributor & Maintainer
Community
- RESF Community Member — Rocky Enterprise Linux Foundation
- First Fellow — D&M Makerspace, Plymouth State University (2017–2020)
- Taught Advanced GIS Programming & Intro to Electromechanics at PSU
- Membership Chair & 3D Printing Captain — Ithaca Generator (2020–2022)
- COVID-19 PPE manufacturing coordination across New England makerspaces
Beyond Code
Photography
Cut my teeth professionally with world-renowned aerial photographer Alex MacLean and Mike Nyman Wedding Photography before going into business as J.S. Event Photography. Wrote and taught the youth photography curriculum at Joppa Flats and Drumlin Farm Mass Audubon Wildlife Sanctuaries — programs still going strong. Work featured at Celebrate Newton, Newton Public Library, Pease Public Library, Newtonville Cinema, Newton Camera Club, Broadmoor Wildlife Sanctuary, and in the Newton Tab. Did my own printing on a heavily modified inkjet printer. Completely burnt out from photography by end of 2017, sold all my gear by the end of college.
Music
20+ years of guitar — currently play a custom 9-string electric made for me in NH and a 12-string acoustic. 25+ years of piano/organ — primarily on a rotary Yamaha organ these days.
"If there were no computers I'd probably be a baker, a minstrel or a bard."
Hospitality
Evening bartender & event organizer at Modern Alchemy Game Bar in Ithaca — organized monthly Goth Nights, art shows & private events. Bartender at The Downstairs Listening Room & Tavern and The Watershed in New York. Casual bagel baker at Tandem Bagel Co in Northampton, MA (Spring 2024).
