Technology

I've spent nearly twenty years building software. It started almost by accident (researching a book on home recording pulled me into the world of music software, and one thing led to another), but it became a real career, and more than that, a way of taking problems apart and figuring out how they work.

I'm also a named inventor on U.S. Patent 9,204,249, from my time at Apple, covering how mobile devices determine and handle time-zone information.

Lately most of my attention is on AI, and what excites me about it is simple: it puts the ability to build software in far more hands. Not everyone thinks in the syntax and grammar a computer needs, but plenty of people have good ideas. AI finally gives those people a way in: you don't need to have learned to code to build the thing you imagine. I think that leaves us with more builders, and more people excited to make things. I'm convinced only good things come of it.

A lot of my time also goes into mentoring. There's always someone earlier along than I am, and I like being useful to them. It's the same thing I've always done, just in a different room.

If there's a thread running between the music, the writing, and the technology, it's probably this: I like understanding how something is built, and then helping other people see it too. That's really what the books are about, what the teaching is about, and in a way it's what the software is about as well.