Roughly chronological, roughly honest. The through-line is low-level work with a user-visible edge: something that has to be fast, correct and shipped, and that somebody notices when it isn’t.
Co-created the TGA image file format for Truevision’s graphics hardware — a compact, easily parsed container for 24-bit images, made because everything available was heavier than the job required.
It survived the boards, the company and several eras of computing, largely because it is small enough to implement in an afternoon.
DV encode and decode work delivered as a contract — frame-accurate, real-time, on the hardware of the day. Video compression is arithmetic under a deadline.
Digital video engineering: compression, codecs, color handling and GPU acceleration inside professional video tooling.
Video processing and color-critical display work for post-production, where “close enough” is a failed shot.
Architecture for a cloud-first physical security platform — video surveillance and access control in one system, with the device integration layer underneath it.
Mobile-first hiring for hourly work: matching, messaging and the unglamorous plumbing that makes a text message arrive.
Where the habit of reading the spec before the tutorial came from.
Co-founder of both, and an architect on a number of their products — graphics boards and the software stack that made them useful for images and video, in the years when putting 24-bit color on a screen was still a hardware argument.
I helped start it and shaped what it was — the idea, the concept, the argument for why it should exist. One of our co-founders ran the place day to day, which was the correct division of labor for everyone involved.
Mostly retired, mostly by choice, and mostly at a keyboard anyway. The current interests are AI technologies — models as an ingredient in ordinary software rather than the point of it — and application development in Flutter, which is the first cross-platform toolkit in a long while that I haven’t wanted to argue with.