NONSTOP COURSE

1. 1ST STAGE

   Founder & Innovator at Knoeone

   March 2023 till now

   Knoeone is the label everything else sits under: enterprise architecture and fractional CTO work for clients on one side, my own products on the other, with the client work paying for the products.

   The client side is end-to-end product lifecycles, bringing together commercial goals, user-centric design and the engineering to ship it. A lot of that is architecture and cloud: zero-trust infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, better performance, a smaller attack surface and lower cloud bills. The rest is agile process, clear communication, and keeping product, marketing and engineering pointed in the same direction.

   The internal side is R&D taken from prototype to public launch. That's where Tishlang came from, a memory-safe compiler ecosystem, along with Dune, the AI-first IDE; PopCraft, the cross-platform vector design application; Nihmbus; and Hypery underneath both of them.

   TypeScript, JavaScript, Rust and C++, with Next.js, WebGL, WebGPU and React Three Fiber on the front.

   The studio site at knoe.one is a Next.js site with a hand-written WebGPU world behind it, a scene per product, and a case study for each of Hypery, PopCraft, Tish, Chuggie, Dune and Nihmbus.

2. 2ND STAGE

   Founder & Principal UX Architect at PopCraft

   March 2026 till now

   PopCraft is one file that holds all of your design work: vector UI, raster painting, pixel art, comic pages and infinite whiteboards, all drawn on a single WebGPU canvas.

   I founded it and run the product strategy, the creative direction and the architecture, from rapid prototyping through to the real implementation. The hard part is the rendering engine: one high-performance pipeline that does Figma-style layout and components, a Procreate-style brush engine and an Aseprite-style pixel canvas, all in the same document.

   On top of that is real-time multiplayer with live cursors, version history, prototyping and interactive widgets, so the document is shared too.

   I care a lot about the creator and developer experience. There's a modular plugin ecosystem with a REST API, custom integrations and AI-assisted workflows, plus a marketplace for plugins and widgets. Importers bring in Illustrator, EPS and Publisher files so people can bring their existing work.

   The look is a bold mid-century pop-art comic book: halftone sunbursts, ink outlines, offset shadows, KA-POW starbursts. I wanted a professional tool that's fun. It runs in the browser or in a Tauri desktop shell, and installs through Homebrew.

   It's the largest thing I've built.

3. 3RD STAGE

   Founder & Head of Engineering at Dune IDE

   April 2026 till now

   Dune is an AI-first native desktop IDE, for developers and vibe coders alike. The editor and the AI are designed as one thing instead of one bolted onto the other.

   I direct the product vision and the architecture, from the first concept through to a full workspace ecosystem. Monaco is the default editor. The extension host is a hybrid that runs extensions in Tish, Bun or Node, with LSP, DAP for debugging, MCP and Git. The agent side is a modular coding agent built into the core rather than parked in a sidebar, so it can see your whole project.

   Underneath it is a headless workspace server. The same session runs on your laptop or on a remote machine, with the IDE as a client of your workspace, and it drops into enterprise deployment pipelines. Extensibility was on the roadmap from the start, which means staying compatible with the extension marketplaces developers already use.

   It's written in Tish, my own language. Tish transpiles to Rust for the Tauri side and to JavaScript for the webview, so when the IDE needs something from the compiler I can just go add it.

   I really wanted it to be a warm, nice place to work. Themes restyle the entire window, not just the text: warm sand, dusty sky, candy pastels, all the way down to the chrome. It runs on macOS, Linux and Windows, and installs through Homebrew.

4. 4TH STAGE

   Founder & Head of Product at Nihmbus

   May 2026 till now

   Nihmbus is a command center for teams that are half people and half agents. Marketing teams deploy autonomous agents across a whole campaign, and the work, the humans and the agents all sit in one workspace.

   I own the product vision and the architecture, and took it from the first sketch to an enterprise product. The workspace is 33 modules on one data model: missions, content drafts, a unified inbox, contacts, research records, visual workflows, docs, kanban, standups. Because it's all one model, an agent can move between them the way a person does.

   Everything hangs off a single action registry. Every capability is defined once, as a Zod schema and a handler, and from that one definition it becomes a UI action, a REST endpoint and an AI tool at the same time. There are over 360 of them, plus a first-party MCP server that exposes the same set to outside agents, so all of those surfaces and the audit trail stay in sync.

   For governance there's workspace isolation, role-based access control, and multi-step approval chains. On top of that is the part I really wanted: an autonomy dial on every piece of work, and a decision queue for the calls that still need a person. Agents can run the whole campaign or ask before every send, and you can always see who did what and who decided.

   Next.js, Drizzle on Postgres with pgvector, the AI SDK, MCP, multi-tenancy, a search index and a collaboration server, with Hypery underneath for authentication and model access. It started as a v0 prototype, and there's an editor extension alongside the platform.

5. 5TH STAGE

   Creator & Lead Systems Architect at Tishlang

   February 2026 till now

   Tish keeps the JavaScript syntax people already know and compiles it to something small, fast and memory-safe, with no runtime to ship alongside it.

   I created it and direct the technical strategy, from the compiler R&D through to the public open-source launch. There are four ways to run the same code: an interpreter and a bytecode VM for iteration, and native compilation through Rust codegen, Cranelift or LLVM when you want a binary. It also targets WebAssembly and WASI, and compiles back out to JavaScript, so the same source runs on web, desktop and embedded hardware, including the Game Boy Advance through Chuggie.

   It's secure by default. HTTP, filesystem and process access are feature-gated, so a binary can be limited to exactly the capabilities it needs.

   The language is maybe half the work. The rest is the toolchain and ecosystem: an LSP, a formatter, a linter, a test runner, a VS Code extension, a package manager, a playground at tish.sh, documentation at tishlang.com, and tutorials at learn.tishlang.com. It's split into crates on crates.io (lexer, parser, resolver, optimizer, bytecode, VM, Cranelift and LLVM backends, WASM, FFI, LSP, formatter, linter, test harness, and the Apple and desktop runtimes) with npm packages alongside them. Lattish puts React-like APIs on top for web and native. There are experimental Polars and Candle bindings for data and inference work. Orbit, the framework this site runs on, is written in it.

   Open source also meant learning to write grant proposals. I've submitted for an NSF SBIR Phase I and the Sovereign Tech Fund, and I work on distribution and adoption as much as the compiler.

6. 6TH STAGE

   Principal Software Architect at AEG Presents

   November 2023 till February 2026

   Building tech to create memorable experiences. AEG Presents is the live entertainment side of AEG, a multi-billion-dollar global division whose software runs underneath concerts, festivals, tours and the people who put them on. I joined as principal software architect in November 2023, hybrid, in Los Angeles, and owned enterprise platform architecture, cloud infrastructure and modernizing how the whole organization builds and ships.

   The biggest piece of work was the CI/CD overhaul: an interdepartmental migration from Azure DevOps to GitHub Actions that I architected, led and delivered. It touched more departments than almost anything the organization had tried technically, and it landed with zero downtime and build and deploy times about 80% faster.

   I also defined and enforced cloud-agnostic development standards across engineering, using tools like Atmos, so the architecture isn't tied to one provider. Between optimizing how cloud resources were allocated and negotiating vendor contracts, we took overall cloud spend down by 30%.

   I rebuilt the core systems behind tour creation too. Setting up a global live tour is a mission-critical workflow with a lot of moving parts, and the redesign reduced systemic errors and cut tour creation time by 60%.

   On the people side, I directed technical strategy and the communication between projects across seven distributed pods and four concurrent projects, keeping the architecture aligned across international teams. I also built out multiple engineering teams, ran the hiring end to end, and brought in some great engineers, several of them people I'd worked with before.

   Almost none of it is public, same as back at Luma. If you were wondering why my public GitHub goes quiet in 2024, this is where my time went. I left in February 2026.

7. 7TH STAGE

   Founder & Program Manager at Hypery

   August 2023 till now

   Hypery is the foundation AI products need before they can build anything interesting, as one SDK and one endpoint: authentication, an OpenAI-compatible gateway in front of more than 200 models, and usage-based billing.

   I built the technical foundation and run the product. Sign-in is drop-in: passkeys, magic links, social and two-factor. The gateway sits in front of the major model providers behind a single OpenAI-compatible endpoint, so switching models is just changing a string. Billing is metered usage with auto top-up and spending limits.

   Beyond that there's OAuth 2.0 application flows that scale, fine-grained access controls, secure workspace scoping, and user management. The four building blocks are designed to work together out of the box.

   The strategy is frictionless onboarding and enterprise-grade reliability, to help other people's ventures get to market faster. It's also the layer Nihmbus runs on, so I'm my own first customer.

   The SDK ships on npm as @hyperyai/sdk.

8. 8TH STAGE

   Founder & CTO, Lead Architect, Director of Technology Innovation, Chief Swag Officer at Agency Enterprise aka ae.studio

   February 2016 till right this second

   It started as Youbeo in 2014 and was renamed Agency Enterprise in 2016, ae.studio for short.

   Co-founder of a Product Development and Data Science studio, hell bent on increasing human agency, based in Venice Beach California. Built by former members of the Crunchbutton team, we were like "hey, we know how to make your startup, so pay us to do it for you!" Four founding employees in 2016, over 150 by 2022.

   The title kept changing because the job did. Founder and CTO for the first four years: stand at the corner flipping a sign that says "Fractional CTO for hire," build and manage the dev teams, scope and estimate and roadmap the clients' visions, sit in the standups and the acceptance meetings and the design arguments, across healthcare, blockchain, finance, wellness, cannabis, fashion, entertainment, education and media. Then Lead Architect from 2020: PoC and stress test client ideas until they survive contact with a real platform, run the internal projects and skunkworks, design the UX for some of our best apps, and champion UI so end users never had to push the "I don't know what this is" button. Then Director of Technology Innovation from 2022: conferences, retreats and super conversations to find the next thing, PoC it, build and mentor the team that uses it, support the product through its life, and cry a little when the client's new team takes it over. Since late 2023, Chief Swag Officer, because t-shirts and hoodies don't design themselves.

   Mostly I just enjoy the sun, eat great food, and hang with awesome people. But when clients come in they are like "sup, TPM" and I'm like "we're on the top floor". Then I just make their product awesome and we pretend I didn't make a dad joke.

   Skunkworks? Passion projects? That's my JAM. GetGratz is the one I am proudest of: the internal peer to peer rewards platform, where I led the team and dropped eight new rewards every month from its 2021 launch, holding over 85% monthly employee engagement. The company hackathons are the other: awards several years in a row, and once a lobster in a bottle of booze, which did not end well. I have a bad habit of redoing stuff into next.js + vercel lately, which started with the company site I rebuilt in Next.js in 2017 and which then ran for five years.

   The part I used to leave out, because I live a very secretive life and/or am a very exclusive dev, ninja even: from 2015 to 2024, Mail Princess, Instill, Discharge, BEAT.R, Ionic Video Chat, Bitcoin Fax and a couple of years of crypto tooling. Go work on Filecoin's Lotus node for Protocol Labs. An Ionic app for Carl's Jr. A portal for Samsung NEXT. The Chicagoist, revived as a React Native app with a Node API and a CMS. A custom apparel pipeline, a dropshipping app called Kersplat, Instill Video, an OTT streaming platform I know as Otter and its successor anotter, Gratz, Billbox, Bound, and a stack of internal tools with names like Turboprop and Reaper. Plus react-native-health, a HealthKit bridge we started in 2016 that was still being worked on in 2024. Most of it was never public, but now you know it exists.

9. 9TH STAGE

   CTO & Co-founder at Crunchbutton

   April 2012 till February 2016

   Co-founder of a food delivery startup with a small team of scrappy startup nerds, in Marina del Rey. We went through the BetaSpring incubator with a fully working prototype on day one, and we were profitable from day one, long before Uber Eats. We ran a pretty lean shop with a dev+design team of 3 total. We built out a cordova hybrid app for Android and iOS back before Ionic or React Native existed. Fun times. Our backend featured one of the many PHP frameworks I build over the ages, with MySQL geospatial queries doing the routing math and an AngularJS front end on top. The admin side ran the whole company: customer service, restaurants, drivers and management tracking orders in real time, scheduling, payroll, and getting restaurants paid. Some of our cooler things most people didn't get to see were our driver apps with awesome multi order pickup optimization using fancy science and the fancy Ed Chen.

   I like to think I convinced my co-founders to move to LA, though probably LA did all the convincing for me. Or perhaps it was all of the cocktails I would gleefully mix for them. Or Irori Sushi.

   Shoutout to Daniel for being the best dev partner ever.

10. 10TH STAGE

    CTO & Co-founder at Give.mobi

    July 2008 till September 2012

    Built an overly complex and customizable mobile giving platform, CMS, and reporting suite optimized for some of the earliest of web capable devices. I’m talking pre iPhone. I was the first and sole developer, designer, architect, brand person, whatever. From scratch, I made it using PHP, MySQL, CentOS, and probably some more stuff. We kept it capable of running without Javascript, which sounds crazy nowadays. We had quite a few cool NPO partners including Global Impact and Get ur Good on back when that was still a thing.

    Thanks Bob for this chapter of my life. Even if you think we were ahead of our time.

11. 11TH STAGE

    PHP Architect at Luma Pictures

    September 2009 till August 2012

    Moved to LA for this awesome job full of awesome crazy people with a great culture in the VFX space. Most people never saw the stuff I worked on since it was almost all internal. I worked on a super suite of tools that connected artists, producers, coordinators, and literally everyone else. There were hundreds of pieces and scripts that connected all that stuff together. I ported hundreds of existing internal tools onto a single PHP MVC framework over the existing database, built a real time asset and resource scheduler in MooTools, a custom ticket system integrated with Redmine, Administaff payroll & time tracking awesomeness, customer asset delivery & review, and much much more. Mostly used PHP and Javascript to connect to the existing MySQL db full of awesome data from the pipeline devs. Also worked on the front facing company web page. Yay. Also won the company wide Mustache March contest.

12. 12TH STAGE

    Senior Software Developer at Eyemagine Tech

    March 2009 till September 2009

    Was I really senior at this age? Someone certainly thought so. I think I was the first hire at this little studio.

    Six months of PHP, Zend Framework and Magento, on some pretty big e-commerce sites. I built the merchandise store for Roddenberry Productions, did Magento upgrades that were somehow fun, and built a payment management back office for the Archdiocese of Chicago. I do not miss you, Magento. You are too needy. Give.mobi was running the whole time in the background, and by September Luma Pictures had called and I was packing for Los Angeles.

13. 13TH STAGE

    Founder & CEO at FriendBot

    April 2005 till August 2009

    Humbly began as an autoit automation script for accepting friends on MySpace for a band that I was working on their website. Did I mention I do tons of freelance dev work? This expanded pretty quickly. I dug up my Visual Basic skills from the past, sold the first version on eBay, and built a suite of Windows tools to send messages, accept friends, etc. As I grew the dev team, we moved to C# for windows, and I can't even remember what we used for Mac.

    I primarily focused my time on building, marketing and selling a tiered suite of software that had friend request accepting, bulk messages, event notifications, friend finding, etc. This included a remote licensing system which allowed labels to purchase a license per account, shifting sales to B2B, making it much easier on me. And to make it even easier, I created a scalable affiliate & reseller platform with built in analytics, payroll dashboards, and customizable hosted ecommerce stores that only sold our products.

    With more growth I negotiated reseller agreements with competitors and partners to maintain our industry position. Created an aggressive set of Google Ads campaigns. Built a PayPal clone payment platform from scratch to support FriendBot, partners and competitors. Created our largest team, the customer support team. And maintained profitability from day one, with multimillion dollar revenue in year one and sales that doubled weekly for years.

14. 14TH STAGE

    Software Engineer at Owl Technology

    March 2005 till January 2007

    Once upon a time there was no YouTube, no Spotify, no SoundCloud. It was a very quiet time for the internet, and with RadioRadio we tried to change that: an artist radio community where labels and bands could host their music, sell it, post tour dates on a map, and argue in the forums.

    Owl was in Tennessee. I built it on some off-the-shelf PHP and Perl with a lot of my own glue: user auth, forums, tour maps, a shopping cart, the search engine plumbing, and a locator and playlist system that started as contract work in May 2005 before it was a job. This was so long ago we still had to make the audio players in Flash and ActionScript. O how the times have changed.

15. 15TH STAGE

    Web Engineer at Simple Star

    October 2005 till May 2006

    The biggest company I ever worked for, in the San Francisco Bay Area, and they still had a startupy exit. Most of my focus was on front + backend developments of photoshow.net, a social photo album site. Think Facebook albums but you can change themes and customize lots of cool stuff. I spent alot of time working with Smarty templates in PHP, adding internationalization, and working with a PHP + Java backend. I also got sucked into some smaller fun projects like a Walgreens and Flickr microsite with a digital print backend.

16. 16TH STAGE

    Senior Web Developer at E-mpire

    May 2005 till October 2005

    When PHP Nuke was more popular than Wordpress, I worked with E-mpire to build our own robust commercial CMS. After having spent a couple years working on my own due to the limitations and lack of security in other options, this was an awesome team-up. We developed and managed pretty innovative, dynamic content management system ideas utilizing mainly PHP & MySQL. Added some built-in advanced SEO strategic systems, and voilà. All systems designed to be platform independent, so it would run on FreeBSD, RHEL, Windows, whatever.

17. 17TH STAGE

    Senior Programmer / R&D Lead at Zepa Studios

    April 2004 till February 2005

    A game studio hired me to be their senior programmer and R&D lead, which in practice meant I was the programmer and the R&D department. I built the studio's own site and the PHP client work that paid the bills, but the part I remember most is the research: this is where I learned enough C++ to prototype their MMO, and where the site and CMS for Lux Aeternia, their MMORPG, came from.

    It was the first place I worked that made games. I kept coming back to games after that: a Unity chicken game at Crunchbutton, a VR runner at ae.studio, a pile of half-finished Unity zombie shooters, and eventually a Game Boy Advance engine written in a language I made.

18. 18TH STAGE

    Web Developer / Designer at AspenTreeMedia

    December 2003 til January 2005

    First day on the job I had to convert a ColdFusion Flash Remoting backend to use PHP Remoting. If you haven't heard of that before, good. It doesn't exist anymore. And probably never should have. But that was so much fun to learn ColdFusion while also doing that work. Most of my work involved Flash in some way at Aspen. Flash was like the thing then. The coolest thing we worked on was the Utah Sports commission website for the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. And now that I read what date I said I started at Aspen, I might be wrong about that start date. I’ll get back to you on that.

19. 19TH STAGE

    Technical / Network Support at M2 / DCTI

    July 2001 til January 2003

    My first actual go to the office job. Maintained datacenter composed of HP-UX, Red Hat Linux, Windows 2000 Server, Windows Server, Cisco PIX, Tandem (HP Nonstop Himalaya Series) and other Cisco infrastructures. Received merchant processing troubleshooting calls and addressed accordingly. Main use of monitor tools included mSQL and in-house developed ColdFusion apps. Daily tasks included fraud prevention / reporting, and server maintenance.

    That all sounds pretty impressive right? But I just sat there and clicked buttons over and over to make sure nothing was broken. And I worked grave shift. Very lonely. But I taught myself a ton about network stuff. And learned some Cisco and Unix.

20. 20TH STAGE

    Freelance Super Hero at My House

    December 31st 1999 till the day I die

    No idea when I started this. But even today I haven't stopped. So this is just a made up section because there was a place in my resume where it looks like I am not working. And that just isn’t the case. Around this time I was pretty focused on LAMP stack, with a sprinkle of Flash/ActionScript here and there. I worked on countless photography and band websites. Seemed like every artist needed their own website done and redone. I did lots of design work. Though not particularly willingly. Code is so much more fun.

    I've done SEO, marketing, sales, whatever it takes to fill the gaps in a small company. Built native apps for iOS, Android, Windows, Linux, Mac, and even some work on PSP. Worked with every backend language that seemed like fun including PHP, Ruby, Python, Go, C#, Node, Perl and even Coldfusion. I've worked with Unreal Engine and Unity, and even have a couple small games I’ve made.

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