About Me

I’m a seasoned entrepreneur, skilled software engineer, multifaceted artist, and adventurous spirit with over two decades of experience partnering with startups. Along the way, I’ve helped three companies each exceed a $1 billion valuation, and I’ve also pursued my own entrepreneurial ventures.

Originally from Canada, I moved to San Francisco in 2009 before transitioning much of my work to New York. This blog doubles as both personal journal and living archive for my projects, thoughts, and adventures—a space where I’m always grateful to hear from readers who find value in what I share.

My approach combines competence, confidence, and curiosity. I thrive on challenges, drawing on diverse skills to navigate and scale through different stages of growth and innovation. Beyond professional pursuits, I’ve climbed mountains, run marathons, embarked on long-distance cycling tours, and maintain a daily yoga practice.

I invite you to join me in exploring entrepreneurship, software engineering, art, and the wonders of life. Let’s take this journey together.

As a Professional #

I’ve worked at several startups, including Airbnb, Mesosphere (now D2IQ), and Braze, among others.

My professional journey began at a Canadian oil and gas company that specialized in manufacturing instrumentation for exploration. Our tools measured pressure, temperature, and other metrics inside wells, often under extreme conditions for extended periods.

In 2009, I joined a California-based firm providing mobile network telemetry and optimization services for telecom companies. While there, I developed a custom database, built an RPC system, and wrote the initial parser for Ericsson LTE layer two network data. The company was later acquired by Tektronix.

I joined Airbnb in 2013 as part of the data infrastructure team, contributing to various open-source initiatives, including Apache Mesos (where I became a PMC member), Chronos, SmartStack, and Kafka. In 2015, I moved to Mesosphere, founded by two former Airbnb colleagues and the creator of Mesos, to help scale the company, establish the sales team, and lay the groundwork for its service organization.

By 2019, I shifted my focus to entrepreneurship after a brief stint at Braze, deciding to pursue my own ventures and build upon the extensive startup experiences I’d gained. I also began writing books on Rust programming, a topic I am passionate about.

You can find a copy of my résumé here.

Public Speaking #

I’ve given talks at many events, including conferences, meetups, and private engagements. Some of the conferences I’ve spoken at are QCon, All Things Open, MesosCon, ContainerCon, LinuxCon, and others.

Open Source #

I’ve contributed to a long list of open-source projects over the years. I am probably most well-known for creating a project called Conky. Today, I have more than 150 public GitHub projects, 2 of which have over 1,000 stars and 6 of which have over 100. Here are some of my projects:

• Conky, a system monitor for X
• ThetaGang, an implementation of “the wheel”, an options trading strategy
• dryoc, a pure-Rust general-purpose cryptography library based on the libsodium library (which is based on the legendary NaCl from djb)
• cracking-the-coding-interview-rust, solutions to interview problems from the book “Cracking the Coding Interview” in Rust
• genserver, an Elixir GenServer-inspired Rust library
• optimal-buy-cbpro, a Coinbase Pro trading bot for dollar cost averaging into “cryptos” if you like that sort of thing
• The HODLer Manifesto, a short manifesto on HODLing
• tweet-delete, a Twitter bot for deleting your tweets
• mother-of-dragons, a miner management tool for DragonMint/Innosilicon mining hardware
• labhub, a bot for integrating GitLab CI with GitHub open-source projects
• doge-streamer, a tool for streaming multiple webcams of my dog Doge from my apartment when I’m away to take the edge off the separation anxiety I feel when I leave her alone

Writings #

I’ve published many things over the years, in addition to the content on this blog, although much of it has been lost to internet rot. Here are a few things you can still find:

• Code Like a Pro in Rust, my first Rust programming book (note: this is an affiliate link)
• Idiomatic Rust, my second Rust programming book (note: this is an affiliate link)

Blog Stats #

Below are some stats for this blog for my fellow data nerds. If you want to dig deeper, head over to the GitHub repo.

Counts of posts and words by year:

Counts of posts and words by month:

Photography #

I’ve always been interested in photography, and my blog features plenty of original photography. You are welcome to use the imagery under the terms of the CC0 1.0 license if you’d like, which permits you to do whatever you want with it (no attribution required). Here’s one example of some photos.

Videography #

I have a neglected YouTube channel, and I occasionally streamed on Twitch in the past, but I lack the passion these days. Notably, my work was featured in a documentary about WeWork on Hulu (for some reason, I still haven’t received my internet money for that contribution).

Some of my YouTube content feels a bit cringe to me now, but I leave it out there anyway because some people seem to enjoy it 🙂

Adventures #

I’ve climbed mountains, run marathons, and done some long-distance cycling (randonneur style). Here are a few examples:

• I biked from SF to NYC unassisted in 27 days. I recorded a daily video log on YouTube
• I raced the Wolfpack Hustle Crash Race before the 2012 LA marathon, crashed 1 mile before the finish line, made it back to the start of the marathon, and then finished the marathon in under 4 hours
• I biked to the summit of Mauna Kea, a volcano in Hawaii, unassisted. The climb to Mauna Kea’s summit might be the longest continuous vertical climb in the world (from sea to summit is over 13,000ft in vertical gain)
• I biked from SF to Chico, through the northern Sierra Nevadas, and then on to summit Mount Shasta

Contact #

If you’d like to get in touch with me, the best way is good old-fashioned email, but please don’t contact me about products, services, or investment opportunities.

This Website #

The source code for this website is available on GitHub.