CS PhD alumnus (2001–2007)
Advisors: Bob Harper, Karl Crary Phone: 412-683-0465(h)
Hi I finished grad school! Now I'm just a guy with a PhD, some papers, and a bunch of projects.
I love programming languages to the max. For my
research I worked on the ConCert Project,
eventually designing and implementing a typed programming language for
distributed programming called ML5. It's based
on modal logic and I formalized lots of the proofs in Twelf so they can be verified
by our patient and careful friends, computers. Lots of people don't
care about programming languages, possibly because they think that all
languages are the same, or they don't want help from their patient and
careful friends, or have never used an optimizing compiler for a
high-level language, or they suspect that programming is mostly about
taping together programs that other people
wrote. I am fairly certain that I have more fun programming than these
people, which makes me sad.
I love to make things. For many years, I used to
crank out loads of TrueType
fonts. I bet you have seen them on posters or T-shirts and not
even known it. I still do that from time to time, but today you're
more likely to find me with my guitar
and homebrew plugins writing music in profusion
for my album-a-day
project or other bands. Like for example I like to make
intricate Nintendo-esque
songs with primitive waveforms. If you go outside, you might
even catch me trying for the ultimately shallow depth-of-field with my
camera.
One of the best things about grad school was that if
you get your work done then you get to do other stuff too. Like for
example in 2003 I wrote a novel called Name of
Author by Title of Book in a month. The next year I wrote
His Sophomoric Effort which I
would even recommend for people to read.
Escape is a cross-platform
puzzle game I made. It's like a push-the-blocks game with other
gadgets and a built-in editor and online features and a lot of really
creative puzzles that people have submitted.
Spare cycles during class are directed into my notes,
which are a stream-of-consciousness circus of typography and
cartooning. They're collected in Illustrated Notes
from Computer Science for your amusement.
snoot.org is a
highly interactive web page I started ten years ago, and occasionally
work on.
