About

I’m self-taught, I’ve been writing code since I was a kid, and I build the whole thing — backend, mobile, web and the infrastructure underneath.

That’s not a boast about breadth, it’s just how I work best. When one person holds the API contract, the mobile client and the deploy pipeline in their head at once, a lot of the usual friction stops existing. It also means I can take something from “idea” to “in the App Store” without needing a team around me first.

What I’m doing now

Most of my time goes to Beyond25, an AI music curator that’s live on iOS, Android, Mac and the web. The interesting engineering there isn’t the model — it’s making sure every track it suggests actually exists and actually plays, which turns out to be most of the work.

Alongside it, Ourlee is in closed beta, and NovaSwift is the thing I build when I want to stop thinking about product — a from-scratch Swift rebuild of a 2002 space sim, which mostly meant reverse-engineering file formats nobody has documented in twenty years.

The one that didn’t work

Before those I spent a long stretch as co-founder and lead developer on Project Yoked, an all-in-one fitness platform. It was enormously ambitious — workout tracking, a video feed, a 1.7M-food nutrition database, a per-muscle recovery model, an Apple Watch app — and it’s shut down now.

I put it on this site on purpose. It was too much surface area for the team behind it, and that is a real lesson about scope that I’d rather have learned on my own project than on someone else’s. Two production libraries came out of it and outlived it: YokedCache and the Expo Media Engine, both still published.

How I like to work

• Ship something small and real before designing the big version.
• Own the boring parts — deploys, migrations, error tracking — because that’s where products actually die.
• Write the honest version of the status. “Kinda broken right now” is more useful to everyone than a green checkmark.

On AI

I use AI heavily, and I’d rather say that plainly than have you wonder. It’s involved in most of what I build. NovaSwift is the clearest example — the engine, and the reverse-engineering of a twenty-year-old resource format nobody had documented, came out of working alongside Claude Code.

Where it earns its place is scaffolding, archaeology through undocumented formats, and being the second opinion at one in the morning. Where it doesn’t is deciding what to build, or excusing me from understanding what shipped. I still own the architecture, the trade-offs and every bug that reaches production — a tool that makes me faster doesn’t make the judgement calls for me.

I think being cagey about this is going to age badly. If it’s disqualifying for a role, better we both find that out early.

Outside of that

Games are what got me into this in the first place — my first released project was a Game Dev Tycoon mod generator in 2016, and I still end up back there. There’s a whole page of it.