This is a now page. Updated September 2026.
Focus
Promoted to Senior Director of Applied AI at Snowplow this summer. The job has shifted from AI-native enablement, helping individuals and teams work well with these tools, to organization-wide strategy and transformation. Same questions as before (what works, what is hype, what is dangerous, what is magic), now asked at the scale of the whole company.
Location
Living in an 18th century New England farmhouse, somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
Reading
Finished the Galactic Empire novels: The Stars, Like Dust, The Currents of Space, and Pebble in the Sky. Now on Prelude to Foundation, which means I have finally arrived at the series that started this whole Asimov project.
A Philosophy of Software Design has changed how I run my software factory. The biggest problem I see with AI-generated code is that complexity grows fast: the agent takes shortcuts, and every shortcut is tech debt someone pays for later. Ousterhout's ideas (deep modules, pulling complexity downward, defining errors out of existence) now shape both the specs I hand to agents and the review criteria I hold them to. The code coming out the other side is noticeably easier to maintain.
Still chipping away at A Pattern Language and Outlive.
Ancient/Future Farm life
Homelab security - Spent some of the summer letting AI agents try to break into my own network, then fixing what they found. A few hundred issues later: the whole network is mapped and every device attributed, IoT devices are isolated from each other, Zero Trust everywhere, and there is an IDS with signal alerts to my phone. The crowning piece is Vigil, a RPi running Kali Linux mounted at the highest point on the property, passively listening to WiFi, Bluetooth, and RF around the clock. It now runs a Hermes agent so I can hand it an investigation and walk away.
Home Assistant - been an avid user for 10+ years, still going deep.
- voice: the RPi satellites run a fully local pipeline on the Mac Studio: Whisper for STT, Kokoro for TTS, and a local model as the brain. Round trip is under a second and nothing leaves the machine. The grumpy 18th century butler personality persists, and the kids still can't stop provoking him.
- phones: added an Asterisk pbx, so the kids' VoIP phone now has streaming radio and a growing menu of local AI extensions: spoken weather reports, jokes, a magic 8 ball, and a full voice chat with the house AI.
- adaptive lighting: lights throughout the house follow the sun, adjusting color temperature and brightness through the day.
Local AI - the daily driver for much of the family. The workhorse moved from Qwen3.6-35B-A3B to Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B, the same mixture-of-experts shape (36B parameters, ~3B active per token), running around 70 tok/s on the Mac Studio. One copy of the weights serves chat, coding, agents, and the cameras. Wrote about the original build here.
Firewood - Had five trees felled this summer and am now sawing and splitting. We burned just under 10 cords last winter, so I will still supplement with a delivery, but a real share of this season's heat is coming off our own land.
Chickens - The raccoon war is won, for now. Serious fortification of the run has held all summer. A new batch of chicks arrives this month.
Beekeeping - Both hives made it through the summer. The Carniolans swarmed, and the colony that stayed behind is rebuilding but may not give us honey this year. The Italians are doing well. Still leaning on the NotebookLM assistant built from our bee school's course materials.
Family
A year of milestones: 20 years of marriage, my 40th birthday, our oldest turned 18, and our fourth becoming a teenager. Where has time gone?
Faith
After a decade and a half in the urban church planting scene, we are now members of a traditional Episcopal parish, confirmed by the Bishop of Rhode Island this June. The daily office, the Anglican rosary, the Sunday liturgy: these rhythms are home now.
After years of leading and building in church life, it's a relief to just show up and pray.
Not Doing
Not saying yes to much, too many years of split focus.
Not outsourcing my thinking to AI. Co-Intelligence is my guiding word in this journey.