Code and research

I love code because it makes sense. If something doesn't work, it isn't the code, it's you, and every time you find the answer you learn a new skill. Code doesn't care who you are or where you've been. It feels like magic.

I've lived inside computers since the Apple Macintosh 512K in 1985, and I've been online since 1987, starting with CompuServe. I made my first games in HyperCard and wrote sprawling text adventures in BASIC on a Commodore 64, saved to 5¼-inch floppies.

The Web arrived in the early 1990s and made the intellectual life I wanted possible. I learned HTML, spent much of the decade designing websites, running BBSes, and building MUSHes in Perl, and learned LISP for music theory while studying English at UC Santa Cruz. After that I moved to New York to work for the Web 1.0 startup Disinformation, and spent most of my twenties running blogs and content marketing while writing books and journalism for VICE Motherboard and Boing Boing.

I started taking code seriously when I founded Ultraculture Incorporated in 2013. A designer asked for half the company in exchange for a WordPress theme (which he had downloaded from Envato), so I decided to build the tech side myself. WordPress led to JavaScript, Python, cloud services, and a great deal more. Within a few years I was consulting with Google's Artists and Machine Intelligence program.

These days most of my technical work is in AI tooling, public-interest data projects, and applying computation to historical manuscripts.