As COVID came to an end and I was feeling ready to move on from my current job at the time, I decided to to pursue some bigger picture projects full-time, both in software research and in my community.

The mix of technical and political work during this time taught me a tremendous amount about collaboration and consensus building in a way that was more nuanced and impactful than in my corporate jobs.

My crowning non-software achievement of this time—playing a key role in getting a huge upzoning ordinance passed—required me to combine research and data analysis skills to technically model the impacts of housing policy in my city, but to then also craft a story around that research, and then to finally sell that story to a wide spectrum of people: politicians, the business community, renters, and home owners alike. At the same time, I managed a grassroots organization of volunteers and sympathetic locals to increase education and outreach, and to ultimately rally a large upswell of community support for the proposal—which passed the city council unanimously.

From an engineering perspective, I spent a considerable amount of time working on a research project centered around a content-addressable assembly language and virtual machine. See (many, many) more details in this overview of the project or on its dedicated project website.

VEIC is a non-profit that lobbies for energy policy at the (VT) state and national level, runs efficiency programs for utility companies, and also contracts efficiency consulting work for the private sector.

This role was a bit of a gamble: it was interesting to me on paper in that it was local and mission driven, but it was not a software company and I wasn't sure what it would look like inside. Ultimately, since software engineering was very much an "assist" role, I ran out of meaningful challenge and room to grow after about a year, though the experience in Python and Data Analytics was valuable. I resigned after wrapping a major project, and learned that the non-profit world is probably not for me.

Magic Leap is an integrated hardware/software platform for head-mounted augmented reality computing, à la Apple Vision Pro or Microsoft Hololens. During my time with the company, it was still targeting a consumer product, not industrial.

ML was a very fast growing (and already large) startup during my time there. I learned the ropes of "Big Tech" in a trial by fire environment, and grew tremendously as an engineer and a team member.

Xemory was an SBIR grant-funded game studio that was taking evolutionary robotics research into the educational gaming market.