Observe
FIELD NOTES IN PUBLIC
Essays written from inside the build rather than above it, including a serial run on applied AI that traces the attention mechanism from research curiosity to the thing everyone now depends on.
What an Ontology Explorer Taught Me
I set out to build a tool that explains ontologies. I ended up building one that's careful about how it explains them, and that was the harder, better project.
The $95 Education of an LLM Cache
Pre-writing 6,000 field notes with an LLM cost more than the plan said and taught more than expected, including which model quietly narrates its own prompt.
The Org Chart vs. the Kinship
Every ontology declares how it's organized. Its concepts have an actual shape that's often different. You can measure the gap, and CIM's is wide.
Teaching a Graph to Rank Itself
A thousand-node ontology is a hairball until you ask it the right questions. Three graph algorithms and one design lesson turn it into a map.
Orient
INSTRUMENTS FOR LEGIBILITY
Orientation is the expensive step, so I build tools for it. The work here turns opaque systems into something a person can reason about, with Emic as the clearest expression of the craft.
Attention, Before It Was the Story
Published research on attention-based neural networks while the field still treated the mechanism as a footnote. I was working on the engine a while before it became the headline.
OntologiesEmic, a Domain in Its Own Words
A read-only explorer that takes a formal ontology, the insider's account of a technical field, and makes it walkable instead of impenetrable. Digital ethnography for technical domains.
Data StrategyGovernance as a Decision Loop
Treating data governance as an OODA problem rather than a policy binder, so the people running a system can see it, weigh it, and act.
Decide
A SECOND BRAIN, OPEN IN OBSIDIAN
A second brain. Several years of connected notes in an open Obsidian vault, the kind of plain-text knowledge base that has quietly become one of the best things to point a model like Claude at, and where a decision gets checked against everything already worked out.