About

I take engagements where the problem is interesting and the system has some weight to it — not greenfield CRUD, but platforms with real users, real data, and real history. Most of my work clusters in a few areas where I've gone unusually deep: content ingestion pipelines, audio and music platforms, search and classification, and the kind of legacy modernization where you have to decide what to keep, what to rebuild, and what to quietly leave alone.

I'm a full-stack engineer, heavy on the backend, with a BFA in graphic design that still shows up in how I think about the front end. I hold a Cornell certificate in Natural Language Processing. I've been writing software, in one form or another, since I was eleven.

Four clients where the work is substantial enough to describe in detail:

• Revolver USA — 20-year relationship. Content ingestion, NLP-based genre classification across a ~100K-product catalog, and the audio preview pipeline behind their store.
• CASH Music — Senior engineer and later de facto tech lead on the open-source artist-platform before it folded in 2020. Led the platform re-engineering effort.
• Sky Therapeutics — De facto technical co-founder for a digital therapeutics startup. Designed the full technical roadmap, infrastructure, and hiring process from zero.
• XRAY.fm — Built the multi-tenant podcast hosting platform for the Portland nonprofit radio station, including RSS syndication and dynamic ad-stitching.

Each of those has a longer write-up if you want to dig in. Beyond these, I've worked with dozens of clients over the past 25+ years across media, education, nonprofits, and startups — including earlier stops at Barbarian Group during the early-2000s era of interactive web campaigns, and eight years running my own small design studio with friends in Boston.

A few things that are consistent across engagements:

Fixed pricing, up front. No “starting at” language, no surprise invoices. If we agree on scope and you pay the deposit, the engagement is locked in. If the intake call shows we're not a fit, no engagement and no charge.

Written deliverables. Most of my audit work produces a document you can hand to your team and act on without me in the room. I'd rather leave you with something durable than a slide deck nobody reads again.

Small number of concurrent clients. Three fractional CTO engagements maximum, at any given time. Advisory and audit work fits around that. I'd rather do fewer things well than more things at half-depth.

Proactive on things you didn't ask about. GDPR is the most common example. I've shipped GDPR compliance work for multiple clients who didn't realize they needed it — often for businesses operating in the EU without knowing their exposure. I don't productize it as a service, but it's part of how I think about shipping responsibly.

Solo by preference, collaborative by practice. I've worked mostly solo for most of my career, with a few nameable exceptions — early contract work at places like Barbarian Group and Digitas, co-running a small Boston design studio, embedding as tech lead with client teams. I like calling the shots on my own work. I'm also genuinely good in rooms with other people's teams — listening, mediating, finding the compromise, disagreeing without making it personal. Both of those are true at once.

The clients I do my best work with. People who know what they're trying to build, or at minimum what they're trying to figure out, and who approach their own projects with seriousness and agency. Creative clients. Proactive ones. Clients who want to make something that matters, however they define that, and who are willing to change the things that need to change in order to get there.

A few small tools I maintain that came out of recurring problems in client work. They're not trying to be frameworks — they're specific solutions to specific things.

Perceptual Randomizer solves a problem I ran into across multiple projects: clients would ask for random results, get genuinely random results, and complain that they weren't random — because actual randomness includes repetition and clustering that human beings read as not random. The package codifies a perception-first approach: reduces entropy deliberately in exchange for outputs that feel more random to users, which usually also makes a product feel more polished and less predictable. Counterintuitive, but reliable.

Laravel Encryption at Rest is a drop-in for one of the harder parts of the GDPR puzzle — encrypting sensitive fields in Laravel models without disrupting day-to-day queries. Came out of compliance work for clients who needed this and didn't want to wire it up from scratch.

Inertia SSR Checker is a small utility for verifying that an Inertia.js app is actually server-rendering when it claims to be.

Vue 3 Game Analytics is a small analytics package built for browser-based game work.

I'm a professional musician — toured the US, Canada, and Europe, released eight albums, ran Circle Into Square Records for about a decade, managing twelve-plus artists through releases, distribution, and tours. The label supported itself and its artists within a couple of years of launching, which still feels like the hardest thing I've done. I haven't toured much since the pandemic, but the music work is why audio and music platforms remain the part of my practice I'm most drawn to.

I'm also deep into botany — specifically the systems side of it. I took a suburban lot in Portland, ripped up the lawn, and rebuilt it as a micro native forest with four canopy layers, remediated soil, and a water plan. Within a few years the migratory birds and butterflies came back. I did the same thing when I moved to New York, and again at my parents' place in Texas. It's the same instinct that shows up in the rest of my work: think about the system end to end, understand what supports what, and plant the right things in the right order.

I read a lot — literature, sci-fi — and I spend time outdoors when I can. Mountains and forests, mostly.

Based in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. I'm from New York, and relocated to Romania in 2025 to live in a place I'd long felt drawn to. I speak Romanian at near-native level, English at native level, and workable Spanish.

I work across EU and US time zones and have set up the practice to operate cleanly across both.