I am the author of The Roots of Progress, a website about the history of technology and the philosophy of progress.

I’m also a part-time technical consultant and adviser to Our World in Data.

Formerly, I was a software engineering manager and tech startup founder. I was co-founder & CEO of Fieldbook, a hybrid spreadsheet-database (read my postmortem).

I’ve also been an engineering manager at Flexport, Amazon and Groupon, and was at a few other startups as co-founder or early employee. Long ago I helped build a biotech supercomputer for D. E. Shaw Research.