I came to software sideways. I was an English major with a minor in Comparative Literature, then spent years reading the sorts of systems that insist they are not systems: federal regulations, funding programs, municipal government, contracts, institutions, and rooms full of people who need the dense thing translated before anybody can act. The material changed. The faculty did not. Find the actual rules, locate the load-bearing constraint, and turn it into something that works.

Now I architect production software and direct AI coding agents to help build it. The useful part is not that the machine can produce code quickly. The useful part is learning how to make a fast, agreeable, confidently wrong collaborator show its work; how to put authorization, money, and data beyond its ability to improvise; and how to recognize when fifty clean reviews are less valuable than one human walking the live path. I hold the architecture, the judgment, and the consequences. The agents hold the wrench when that is the best use of them.

The same method follows me into the workshop. A converted merchandising refrigerator became a filament-drying cabinet, killed four thermoelectric coolers, and forced me to admit I had optimized the wrong variable. That is not separate from the software work. Both begin with a model of how the thing ought to behave. Both get interesting when the physical world refuses the model. Both improve when the failure is treated as evidence instead of embarrassment.

Why this site exists

This is the public workbench: finished systems, live research, build logs, corrections, and the occasional argument about how we know what we think we know. I’m interested in claims with their frames attached—what was measured, what the unit was, what the test could not prove, and what changed after the first answer failed.

The names are part of the architecture. Myth, legend, literature, music, and mechanical objects were how I learned to hold complicated shapes before I had technical language for them. Castor and Pollux, Leda, Cypher, Metis: they are not decoration pasted onto a diagram. At their best, they are compressed job descriptions. If the name stops fitting the mechanism, one of them needs to change.

I’m based in Pittsgrove, New Jersey. I build for clients through Pyris, pursue the stranger questions here, and remain more persuaded by a working artifact with an honest caveat than by a perfect story about one.