h i g h l i g h t s

 

 

strike valley studio :: consulting

I’ve spent my career working every side of the software craft: invention, design, engineering, architecture, team leadership, product management, and strategy.

AI tightens the loop between intent and execution. Capturing this advantage requires new approaches. I started Strike Valley Studio to help companies build and adapt for this moment.

If you want to build AI-powered software, rewire workflows for AI, or help your team work differently — reach out.

 

shipped work

  • plasmite — interprocess communication via persistent, disk-backed message channels. Local IPC doesn’t require a broker or a daemon. Zero-copy memory-mapped reads hit ~600k msg/sec while surviving crashes. Bindings for Rust, Python, Go, Node, and C.

  • ergo — a planning CLI for AI coding agents. Claude Code, Codex, and friends can use ergo to break work into epics and a task graph. Plans are stored as simple, append-only JSONL in your repo. Concurrency-safe, fast, and easy to adopt as a one-liner in AGENTS.md. ~25 stars on GitHub.

  • superconnect (client project) — AI-powered code generator tool to create Figma Code Connect mappings.

 

 

softmax

In a visiting role at SoftMax, an AI startup doing research in Reinforcement Learning and alignment, I focused on human learning problems: how the research team exchanges ideas and learns from each other, and how newcomers get started on the platform. I built internal collaboration tools and pedagogical Python notebooks that shortened the path from cold start to real RL experiment.

 

 

meta :: supernatural

supernatural

Product Manager at Supernatural (VR fitness, acquired by Meta) (2022-2025).

The most interesting work here was a 0 → 1 exploration of AI-powered coaching for Meta smart glasses. Instead of pre-recorded workouts, we prototyped dynamically-generated audio coaching that adapts to the user’s workout in real time. In under a quarter we created new cross-org partnerships, delivered three distinct and detailed product visions, and broke ground on the first functional prototype.

I also led foundational work behind multi-player workouts (“Supernatural Together”) and drove compliance with Washington State’s “My Health My Data” law in close partnership with Meta legal.

 

 

magnopus :: product engineering

Director of Engineering for Product at Magnopus (2020-2022). I built the US side of the company’s first product team, starting in the middle of the pandemic.

The goal was not just to ship software (which we did — our AR app & platform OKO was named a Time Best Invention of 2022.) but to establish a durable way of working suited to ongoing product development, as distinct from the cadence of client work. The workflows I put in place helped our new cross-functional teams move quickly and deliver with rigor.

I also designed and led a structured product R&D process around the “spatial office” — how to better integrate in-office and remote work, using spatial awareness. We started with broad cross-functional brainstorming, downselected and matured the strongest ideas, then built in order to learn. Within about 90 days we activated the first prototype, an experiment in lowering barriers to serendipitous collaboration. The system would detect in-office clusters of co-located people and generate a communication channel for them, allowing remote colleagues to hail or join the conversation.

We explored several prototypes this way. None shipped as products, but the process worked and we learned what we needed to.

 

 

oblong industries :: mezzanine

Early version of Mezzanine circa 2015.

Product Manager for Mezzanine (2018-2020), an immersive meeting product that let distributed teams connect their rooms and collaborate as if in the same space.

Mezzanine was a flexible digital canvas — multiple data streams in any layout, integrated with digital and analog whiteboards and a range of videoconferencing systems. It found a market with a long list of Fortune 500 customers and featured forms of interaction unique in this product category.

I drove measurable improvements to core usability and led a radically simpler Mezzanine edition from concept to shipping in six months. That simpler edition served end users and made Mezzanine a better fit alongside Cisco’s videoconferencing endpoints.

 

 

oblong industries :: client solutions

Director of Engineering, Client Solutions (2010-2018). I grew and led an interdisciplinary team of engineers and designers who created a series of immersive environments for clients including IBM, McKinsey, and ESPN — interactive spatial experiences at massive scale, 100 million pixels rendered in realtime.

With less than a tenth of company headcount, the group regularly earned a much larger fraction of company revenue. I contributed individually, defined technical architecture, managed client relationships, and managed the team.

warehouse 1
warehouse 2

 

 

oblong industries :: ibm watson experience centers

IBM-produced promotional video.

The Client Solutions team’s flagship work: a series of IBM Watson Experience Centers in New York, San Francisco, Cambridge, and Munich (2013-2020). IBM used them to educate customers and constituents about machine learning — through dynamic, interactive visualizations and experiential setpieces.

The centers featured large pixel walls and immersion rooms in various configurations. Interaction happened via touch, spatial pointing devices, voice, and proximity.

These UX Design Award-winning collaborations with IBM and partners like Local Projects were prototyped and developed at our warehouse in Los Angeles, in C++ and OpenGL.

 

 

oblong industries :: process

The team maintained sustainable workloads, low turnover, and a track record of on-time delivery.

Most of the client work can’t be shared, but these videos give a sense of the prototyping process and some of the technical work: realtime data visualization, high-performance distributed rendering, interaction design, and systems integration.

 

 

oblong industries :: greenhouse sdk

I was one a principal architect and maintainer of Greenhouse, a C++ creative coding SDK built atop Oblong’s g-speak spatial operating platform. Greenhouse gave developers more approachable abstractions and faster time-to-joy than g-speak itself.

Oblong’s clients came to rely on it, and it was made available to the public as well. The Client Solutions team used Greenhouse in production for over 5 years.

 

 

oblong industries :: saudi aramco

An immersive geology visualization and simulation application built on Oblong’s g-speak platform, controllable via gesture gloves, touchscreens, mobile devices, or web interfaces (2010-2012). This video shows me demonstrating work in progress on a miniature version of the real, much larger system in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

 

 

accenture :: interactive wall

“The Wall” was the earliest multi-touch, high-performance pixel wall to see daily use in public. Deployed at O’Hare, JFK, and other airports beginning in 2006, less than two years after inception. Some of these systems stayed operational for nearly 10 years.

Three people built the whole thing at the Accenture Technology Labs. We also wrote research papers on it, some still referenced in HCI literature.

I contributed to every layer: hardware prototyping, patented computer vision algorithms, physical enclosure design, a 60fps clustered rendering framework in C++/DirectX, and applications built on top of it.

wall wall 2

wall :: publications & coverage

 

 

public talks

 

 

art :: sagrada perihelia

An experiment in buoyant architecture, this piece was created for Burning Man 2019 and partly supported by a Black Rock City Honorarium Grant. The larger balloon is 8 feet in diameter and lit from inside by a large LED filament we created. The hundred other balloons are also lit from within by LEDs, but the delicate visual effect of this doesn’t photograph well. Guess you had to be there! :) More details available at the art project blog/newsletter. (On the landing page, click “Let me read it first”.)

dawn 1 night day detail dawn 2

 

 

music

==> Listen to the cassandras on Spotify.

 

 

education

  • Cornell University, English, Master of Arts
  • University of Utah, Computer Science, Bachelor of Science
  • University of Utah, English, Bachelor of Arts

 

 

blog

A little blogging from time to time, as a treat.