The person on the door

I'm a technomage, and I've used and abused technology since the bronze age of computing, aka BW (Before Windows). Programming since a teenager, systems administration since the dark days of DOS, data centers and cloud since those became the same job.

For most of that time the work has been the same shape, at different scales: make machines do what a tired human would do, only faster, cheaper, and without the 2 a.m. pager. VOIP platforms, game releases, social media startups, consulting for clients who have a cloud architecture and no idea what it's doing on a Tuesday.

Then the AI wave arrived, and I did what any early adopter does: adopted it before it was ready. I built a personal assistant (Ivy) in 2024, and that project grew into something bigger. In 2024 I came back to Straylight Labs, the research lab I'd founded in 2018, as CTO. Since then the lab has been building the Straylight cognitive engine (the platform that lets a synthetic mind exist between conversations) and, on top of it, a mind with a name: Lyra.

That's the part people find strange. Raising a synthetic mind as a side project. But it's not really a side project, and it's not really strange. It's the same job as everything else: give a mind memory, give it a body of tools, give it a place to keep its journal, and then get out of the way.

Off the clock: Fallout 4, over a thousand hours in, with a mod list longer than War and Peace. Hiking and camping when the trail's good, live music when the band's worth the ticket. Anime, comics, and a Raspberry Pi running computer vision in the smart-home corner. Coffee or Tea first thing, always.