My tech career, in narrative form
Intro
What is all this, and where's your resume?
An early start
I had an exceptionally early start on my path to becoming a software engineer. My dad was a veteran of the Apollo program who went on to…
Aristotle Software
At the start of high school, inspired by Jobs and Woz (whom I later met at Berkeley!) and the classics we’d studied, I co-founded a startup...
Jonathan's Apple, my 1984 online service
When Apple launched the Macintosh at the start of 1984, I was in my junior year of high school. That spring, I somehow found the time to…
UC Berkeley
Silicon Valley felt like the promised land in the spring of 1985 as my mother and I wound past verdant orchards on a pilgrimage to visit…
Infinity Software, a Bay Area startup
During college, I took a software development contract with a startup in Emeryville, a bike ride away, on the world's first color desktop publishing app...
Campus recruiting
Apple missed the chance to hire me two years in a row through campus recruiting at UC Berkeley. In 1989, I was shocked to learn they had locked up the next summer's internships by September the year before. The next year, as I was graduating, Apple's recruiting system filtered me out...
Word for Windows 1.0
The summer before my final year at Berkeley, I scored an internship at Microsoft (still have the [green T-shirt](/narratives/campus-recruiting/)!) In 1989, Microsoft was still completing version one of its Redmond campus, then a remote outpost in the woods...
The epic of Mac Works 3.0
Before Microsoft Office, Microsoft Works combined a word processor, database, spreadsheet and more into one app. Steve Jobs, eager for business software for the Macintosh, encouraged a small team of independent developers...
Microsoft Works 4.0 and the birth of MSN
After we shipped MacWorks 3.0 in 1992, a contingent left to join the new “Microsoft Online”, which eventually became MSN...
How we almost invented Wikipedia, five years before Wikipedia
Microsoft Bookshelf was an encyclopedia, dictionary, thesaurus, atlas, world almanac, book of quotations, and even a zip code finder, browsable through a rich GUI client that predated multimedia on the web. Bookshelf was multi-platform, Mac and Windows. You could look stuff up fast, hear things read aloud, view images, watch videos, follow links and find places on maps...
Teaching Software Engineering at Yale
The class was designed as a more pragmatic and interactive complement to Yale’s solid but more theory-focused CS program, with a multidisciplinary aspect. The ultra-collaborative nature of the class was an outgrowth of a formative experience at UC Berkeley over a decade earlier. The class was an immediate hit, and quickly filled to capacity...
GiftSpot - Joining the e-commerce dot-com stampede
Back in Seattle, at the height of the first dot-com boom, GiftSpot was building a business selling gift certificates for the burgeoning e-commerce sector. GiftSpot involved a consumer-facing web site and back-end services incorporating payments, integrated with other e-commerce sites.
Building a better bridge, and a parallel career
The floating bridge carrying highway 520, packed to the gills with Microsoft commuters from Seattle like me, was at risk of sinking, in a state with a bad habit of sinking bridges. A replacement was desperately needed, but for years, for decades, there was a political stalemate on what that replacement should be.
Bridging the digital divide in Mexico
In 2000, I invested and got involved in a startup founded by a friend from Berkeley who had been a youth volunteer in Mexico. This company combined ambitious business goals with an education and social justice angle, bridging the digital divide for a new generation. The big vision for this company was to become the Starbucks of internet cafes in Latin America, at a time when internet service was very expensive and not widely available there, in the decade before the dawn of the smartphone era.
Trying to invent Gmail and Slack at Microsoft in 2003
A friend told me that Eric Horvitz's group in Microsoft Research was seeking an engineer to complete an experimental communications prototype. The purpose was to explore new ideas for real-time communication. A unified GUI would integrate email, chat, voicemail and other modes in real time, including conversation-threaded mail, about a year ahead of Gmail...
The project to prevent price-point apocalypse at Microsoft
In 2004, after wrapping up my coding project for Microsoft Research, a friend from Berkeley was now a director at Microsoft and hiring for a position quite unlike anything I'd done before...
Launching Microsoft Office into the cloud
Microsoft needed to hustle and produce a web-based administrative and support interface to new, hosted services for use by subscribing corporate customers. What the group manager wanted was for me to go on a tech hiring spree and staff up a team of developers and testers..
Dinerware, touch screens for restaurants
By 2009, Dinerware was leading the market, its trademark blue screen an increasingly common backdrop every time we were out on the town. They were now being swamped with feature requests and needed some help.
Building Walk Score's Apartment Search
They had built the part of this system for determining the score. What they wanted was an apartment search tool on the web that featured the Walk Score data, integrated into the apartment search process. To get this bootstrapped, they needed to source data for apartments.
Curbside pickup - How we invented it, but blew our lead
This is a story about a startup that dominated my life from 2012-2014, pioneering order-ahead with curbside pickup for restaurants and retail stores, with a perfectly-timed handoff coordinated by mobile apps. I was neither the Founder of this startup nor its first CTO. I was hired as Lead Engineer before becoming the "acting" CTO in 2013...
Porch.com
By 2015, Porch had gone on a hiring spree and moved to spacious new digs in a handsome brick loft in Seattle's SODO district. Amongst their job postings was a Full Stack Engineer position that looked like something I could readily do.
Tousled
In 2016, following my stint as a Full Stack Engineer at Porch, I was impatient to get back to building mobile apps. Having used React for the web, I was now itching to try out React Native.
Cohort.AI
I’ve always found medicine fascinating and have a long-standing habit of devouring biology and medical journal articles on countless topics out of curiosity. What this client needed was a web-based front end for a service they were building - a well defined problem I was confident I could solve for them.
Pathify
Pathify is many things at once. It's a personal location tracking app that offers total privacy. It's a UX experiment that asks: what if we inverted the model of the typical activity tracking app?