Last updated: November 2026.

Wrapping up seven years on Laboperator

I'm in my last stretch at LabAthena, and with it seven years on Laboperator — a plug & play platform that connects all of a lab's instruments, collects their data automatically and automates the devices themselves, so scientists can spend their time on science.

I joined that team at Labforward, stayed with it through Xavo, and ended up as CTO and CISO at LabAthena. Seven years is long enough to watch a product grow up: the instruments, the protocols, the data model, the handful of edge cases that turned out to be the whole problem. I'm leaving it in good hands, and I'm grateful to the people I built it with — the engineers who took the hard parts seriously, and the scientists and lab teams who kept telling us, patiently and repeatedly, what they actually needed.

I'm still not a scientist, and I still find it exciting that something I helped build might sit somewhere in the path of a discovery.

Figuring out what's next

I genuinely don't know yet, and I'm giving myself room to not know for a bit.

What I do know is which part of the work I keep coming back to: sitting where people and technology meet. Listening to the people who use what I build, digging past the first description of a problem to the one that's really there, and finding the solution that doesn't just fix it but lets them do more than before. Everything else I've enjoyed — the systems, the data, the security, the code itself — has been in service of that.

So I'm looking, slowly and with a fairly open mind. If you're working on something where that sounds useful, I'd like to hear about it — LinkedIn is the easiest way to reach me.

Building with agentic coding tools

Most of the code I've shipped this year, I didn't type. I described it, read it, argued with it and sent it back. It's changed how I work more than any tool since I started programming, and it's changed which ideas I bother trying. I've been writing about what that means for the people who build software.

Making things for fun again

That cheaper path from idea to prototype finally got me to build Voice Runner, an endless runner whose stages are generated from whatever music is playing around you, and which you steer by shouting at it. It had been sitting in my head for a year.

Since then I've gone back to an older itch and rebuilt my CHIP-8 emulator — the same machine implemented in C++, Rust and Go, and compiled to WebAssembly so you can play it right here. More small playgrounds like these are likely to show up, and I expect to have more time for them shortly.

Writing again

After more than a decade of silence, this blog is alive again. All of that has me thinking hard again about what it means to be an engineer, and to build a product. When writing the code stops being the hard part, what's left is deciding what's worth building at all. Building the right thing matters more than ever. Ideas are cheap. They only become valuable once they're in people's hands, and they're only worth putting there if they solve something real.

That's the thread running through what I've been writing lately:

• Say the Magic Word: computers asked us to talk to them in 1977, then spent forty years building interfaces that made sure we couldn't. Now we finally can, which means rethinking what an interface is for.
• Technology for the People: nobody has ever been forced to play Tetris. Most software doesn't have that luxury, and the industry has gotten good at not noticing whether people actually want what we ship. Cheap prototypes might make us notice.
• Above and Below the Code: as typing code shrinks, the job moves to the work around it, above the code (knowing what to build and why) and beneath it (infrastructure, data and security).