2025 to present
Solana Developer Relations
I create blockchain finance content at Quicknode.
Work
Work history
2023 to 2024
Developer Education
I ran education at the Solana Foundation, where I created a four-day Solana training program taught to hundreds of students from Romania to US Ivy League universities. I co-created and presented the 2024 Developer Bootcamp. I was responsible for the Solana developer courses, the highest-retention content on solana.com, and ran a team of six Superteam contributors who maintained them. I wrote solana-helpers, about 30,000 downloads a week.
2022 to 2023
CTO
CTO of Portal Payments. Two prizes at the Solana Sandstorm hackathon. We built a novel key recovery mechanism that allowed wallets to be recovered with cryptographically secure yet memorable phrases, and solved the “sent to wrong account” problem by creating an identity token displayed when entering a recipient address.
2021 to 2022
Technical lead and advisor, CMC Invest
Technical lead and advisor on CMC Invest, the CMC Markets iPhone app for shares, ETFs, and funds in the UK.
2021
Engineer
First engineer at Humanloop, a Y Combinator company. The product was a machine-learning classification model that engaged human subject-matter experts to push into cases where the model's existing training data was incomplete. The product was a document interface for those humans in the loop to interact with the model.
Humanloop exited to Anthropic in 2025.
2020
Engineering lead
Engineering lead for a team of six and 160,000 users. I made search results deterministic, migrated the chat backend with no downtime, shipped the first revenue-generating feature (live workshops), and cut CI from 42 minutes to 2.
2018 to 2020
Founder
Entrepreneur First, London. The idea was to plug a product into an integrated SaaS business instead of assembling billing, users, CRM, and messaging by hand. It did not continue after a cofounder split.
2015 to 2020
Founder
I founded CertSimple, used by Monzo, Buzzfeed, and most London fintechs. Verifying the legal entity behind a website, for display in the “green bar” browsers showed at the time, took up to a month. I invented a process that reduced the time to a few minutes. The company reached £22k a month, was featured in TechCrunch, and was part of Entrepreneur First. Y Combinator flew me to Mountain View for final founder interviews in 2016, but I wasn't selected for the cohort.
CertSimple exited, selling its core technology to DigiCert, and sold the name and brand to Expedited Security in January 2020.
2014 to 2015
Tech lead
- MyCognition Rise. A site for MyCognition's Rise cognitive training product, and the payment and signup flow around it. Node, Stripe, and Quaderno.
- Microsoft Surface 2 launch campaign site. CSS, Node, and Azure, with Twitter and Instagram API integrations.
2014
Tech lead
- Waves watched Twitter for a keyword, hashtag, or user and alerted on changes in sentiment, volume, and related words. When the Prime Minister of Ukraine resigned, Waves sent alerts 40 minutes before BBC and Sky had published a story.
- Online Wednesday was an internal tool for American Express to find products people were talking about and rank interest using Facebook and Twitter.
2013 to 2014
Founder
Deploy from version control to the cloud. Firework brought commits, deploys, logs, and CI into one place, then used that to get the right build into an environment.
2012 to 2013
Senior Developer
- I conceived and built Tips, where customers of retailers and brands trade tips and get recognized by their peers and by the brand.
- The same work included Facebook apps for ratings, stories, and questions.
- Social Deployer, which took a GitHub commit to an autoscaled environment on Amazon EC2.
2008 to 2012
Google Creative Lab
- Getting American Business Online. Google's program to get businesses online. It was the largest Google App Engine app at the time, in 33 countries, with a layout engine so a local team could adapt the site to a state or a country.
- Android 4 launch. Worldwide retail training for the Android 4 and Galaxy Nexus launch, with a quiz, results reporting, and a site internationalized to every Google market.
- YouTube World View. Citizens put questions to world leaders, including Barack Obama, David Cameron, and Angela Merkel. It was the first use of the YouTube Live API, and the live interviews were watched by millions of people.
- Google's 10th birthday in Germany. An interactive site for Google's work over the previous decade in Germany. Built in a weekend, advertised on German television.
2010 to 2011
Founder
Realtime, threaded, anonymous discussions. No logins: each person in a thread got an animal avatar. It reached the front page of Hacker News. The site later closed, because it needed moderation to stay safe.
2009 to 2010
Low-latency trading engineer
Co-located index arbitrage for high-frequency trading. Mainly low-level Linux kernel tuning and network engineering.
2008 to 2009
Linux architect
Linux architect for the world's largest listed hedge fund.
2006 to 2008
IBM Linux Services
Built a system to audit and resolve privilege revalidation for 75,000 people's user accounts. Led a team of six to build the Telstra Enterprise Data Warehouse for one of the largest companies in Asia.
2003 to 2005
Trainer and consultant
Linux and Python trainer and consultant. My name is in the default sudoers file.
2003 to 2008
Technical journalism
Feature writer and columnist
Feature writer at APC, columnist at PC Authority, 40,000 words of Linux Pocketbook.
1999 to 2003
Technical specialist
Built the Small Business Linux Server appliance, a turnkey local email / file sharing device, and created a five-day Red Hat administration course the company later sold the rights to.
1996
Doom: The Path
A Doom II level
A Doom II level, built at 15. Deep water, filling tanks, floating platforms, and custom textures and sounds.
