I consult corp-to-corp through my company Futurescale

• 📅 - If you'd like to hire me or just chat about something interesting, you can grab a slot on my calendar.
• 📋 - My resume is here if you're interested.

Tools and Languages

I've slung a lot of code since the days of 6502 assembly for C64 and the Apple ][. Here's where I'm strongest at the moment.

• React
• Node
• JSX
• Typescript
• JavaScript
• OpenAI API
• Model Context Protocol (MCP) - I am a contributor

Project Leadership

When leading teams to deliver code, I am convinced that unit testing and rigorous code review can make a team stronger and certainly elevates quality. The best compliment for a team I've led was that the codebase appeared as if created by one person.

In my years as an engineer, I've noted that domain language drift across teams and departments is a major source of friction and misunderstanding. That's why I approach new projects with domain-driven design, i.e., agree upon the things and the processes that operate on the things first (nouns and verbs). Build a glossary for your project. That way, everyone from code to marketing is on the same page from the jump about what to call the things and what can be done with them.

Software Architecture

And within modular software, the biggest problem is separation of concerns, e.g., not muddling view handling responsibiilities with business logic and domain logic. When I began working for large clients like WeightWatchers and Morgan Stanley, I felt that the tools avaiable for addressing these concerns were overcomplicated and made maintenance harder.

So in 2004 I created the PureMVC Framework, a lightweight, object-oriented MVC architecture that was eventually ported to over 15 programming languages and is still used today. Also wrote the O'Reilly book.

Building Agents

• ✨ Puzzlebox is an MCP server that hosts finite state machines (called puzzles). With the GooseTeam project, we learned that attempting to make agents collaborate with a protocol for collaboration can generate results. But where it gets muddled is with non-trivial projects that need to employ phases. Inception, specification, design, building, etc. Within one of those phases an approach like GooseTeam can work well. This is where Puzzlebox comes in. It exposes tools to create and manipulate puzzles, moving state machines through their states. Clients can subscribe to individual state machines to receive updates when their state and available actions change.

• ✨ GooseTeam is an MCP server I wrote for enabling collaboration between a team of Goose agents. Given an arbitrarily complex project such as outlining a television series pilot or creating a non-trivial software application, the agents utilize tools exposed by the MCP to plan, assign, and complete tasks in service of the goal. This project is pioneering the use of mermaid markdown for controlling agents.

• ✨ At Culturalyst, I recently built an arts and culture focused, city-specific AI assistant for improving artist discovery. Separately, I overcame a showstopping issue with gathering artist opportunities from around the web and delivering to subscribing artists those relevant to their discipline and experience. With AI, I was able to classify opportunities from arbitrary sites into our taxonomy, normalizing the data into our domain model such that they appeared to have been entered through our own UI.

• ✨ With PlotRocket, an AI-assisted series planner and episode outliner, I am combining artificial intelligence with common industry practices for creating episodic fiction, yielding a tool capable of planning multiple seasons of a television series down to the scene and beat. With or without the use of AI. It allows anyone to turn an idea into an engaging episodic story.

Where I've been all these years

My developer journey has been both deep and wide. So many different ways and things to code out there. The good idioms and practices carry forward, even when the old tech gets replaced by new. Here are just a few things I've been up to since starting my company in 2004.