Welcome! I'm a researcher exploring malleable software: computing environments where anyone can mold their tools to their own unique needs.

For more background on what that mission means and why it matters to me, check out my interview on the Metamuse podcast.

I'm currently a senior researcher at the independent research lab Ink & Switch, leading our Malleable Software research track.

Before that, I completed a PhD at MIT CSAIL in the Software Design Group advised by Daniel Jackson. Before that, I spent five years as an early engineer and designer building the edtech startup Panorama Education (YC S13).

These days, I'm thinking a lot about AI + malleable software: How can LLMs help people make their own custom software?

Essay: Malleable software in the age of LLMs

Talk: Dynamic documents as personal software

If you'd like to hear about my future work, you can subscribe to occasional email updates, or follow on Twitter or RSS.

Malleable Software

Local-First Software

Riffle

Building data-centric apps with a reactive relational database

Peritext

A CRDT for rich text, to enable async collaborative writing

Cambria

Better cross-app data compatibility using bidirectional lenses

Programming Interfaces

Margin Notes

Automatic code docs w/ recorded examples from runtime

TodoMVC Vis

Visualizing the internal behavior of TodoMVC in Redux

JSON Sheets

A reactive programming environment for building GUIs

Writing

Stevens: a hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs

Avoid the nightmare bicycle

AI-generated tools can make programming more fun

Your pie doesn't need to be original (unless you claim it so)

7 books that stood the test of time in 2023

Codifying a ChatGPT workflow into a malleable GUI

Malleable software in the age of LLMs

ChatGPT as muse, not oracle

Fuzzy API composition: querying NBA stats with GPT-3 + Statmuse + Langchain

For your next side project, make a browser extension

Dynamic documents // LLMs + end-user programming

Bring Your Own Client

How tweet threads cured my writer's block: Twitter as a medium for sketching

Foam: Software as Curation

Climate art, hacking Autodesk, and other funemployment projects

Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software

Adding tail call optimization to a Lisp interpreter in Ruby

ENHANCE!: Upscaling images CSI-style with generative adversarial neural networks

No Redis Needed: building a Postgres-backed recommendation engine for Rails

The Virtual Cafe: a better way to hang out remotely

Building Waze for the Boston subway: my first adventure in civic hacking

2014: A year in review with iPhone pedometer data

Interviews

Metamuse Podcast: Bring your own client

Metamuse Podcast: Dynamic documents

Build Software Quickly Podcast: End-user programming

Superorganizers Newsletter: on research tools/process

Contact me

Please reach out if you're interested in chatting about ideas, or if I might be able to help you in some way. You can contact me via email or on Twitter.