I don’t believe I’ve ever intro’d myself, so here goes! My winding path: 1. First love was reading & language - hundreds of books while homeschooling (up to 8th grade) 2. Puzzles were my jumping off point into math (which I’d hated). Joined the math team and got shown how to program a TI-83, got hooked on ‘game’ programming. The ease of getting pixels on the screen has haunted me ever since. 3. Undergrad at Penn in bioengineering: not the best choice of major (should have done CS/CompE), but developed appreciation for the resilience/scalability of biological systems compared to mechanized tech, as well as alt forms of computing (e.g. biomolecular logic gates) 4. A bioinspired robotics class followed by a WONDERFUL intro to mechatronics intro’d me to electronics & microcontrollers and connected a bunch of dots. The ability to turn ideas into real devices was heady. 5. Switched to masters in robotics and did a capstone project with very talented partner. Designed a system to connect assistive inputs for people with disabilities to game consoles motivated by observations growing up with my bro. Also led to a neat collab with a rehab robotics lab using gaming for stroke rehab. Decided it was worth trying to make exist in the world & entered the spooky realm of entrepreneurship. 6. Have pretty much nailed the liminal space between success & failure - much progress made, still no product. In the process, discovered Bret Victor, the FoC slack, Alan Kay, etc & have had my mind repeatedly blown while mining computing history. The more I’ve learned, the more I’ve come to see accessibility and FoC as twin issues best tackled as a pair. Finally had some breakthroughs based on an NSF Phase I SBIR grant, & am reformulating the system around proper computing atoms (h/t Alan Kay) vs a glorified config system. Feeling good about our odds if Phase II funding comes through. My thoughts have crystallized quite a bit over the past few months, and I’m looking forward to good conversations here and progress to report. Feel free to reach out; I enjoy and benefit from verbal sculpting. An emerging primary viewpoint is programming as modeling & simulation (i.e. proper “science”).

❤️ for "verbal sculpting" in particular

I love how “the FoC slack” is between Bret Victor and Alan Kay 🤣

order of operations 😅

(Fellow home-schooled mathlete secret handshake)