About Me

I'm a software engineer with 12+ years of experience building high-performance real-time systems. I optimize ruthlessly, and know when not to.

I'm one of the co-founders of Pansimula, a small indie studio obsessed with building games worth playing. My focus is designing performant gameplay systems that survive the collision of art, physics, AI, and real hardware constraints, profiled under real conditions.

I've contracted on educational titles, prototyped novel mechanics, and debugged production crashes under deadline pressure. That work taught me clarity, measurable results, and ruthless prioritization.

My background is multidisciplinary. I studied both philosophy and computer science, and that combination has shaped how I approach problem solving and system design. Philosophy gave me the ability to decompose complexity, question assumptions, and communicate ideas with precision.

I'm comfortable sitting with genuinely hard abstractions. That comfort translates directly into how I design and reason about software. An 'optimal' algorithm that nobody can interpret or maintain is worse than a simple, direct solution. Ruthless optimization should only be the focus when it actually matters.

I've taught C# and algorithms in classroom settings, covering boolean algebra, data structures, time/space complexity, and algorithm design, with an emphasis on robust fundamentals over memorization. I've also mentored junior developers through real systems work and production problem-solving.

I've built a suite of three MIT-licensed plugins for SquadJS, an open-source server management framework running on live 100-player competitive multiplayer servers. These aren't hobby projects. A bad deploy means potentially ruining an hour-plus of coordinated gameplay for a full server. There's no margin for error.

The work pulled me into territory I hadn't previously spent much time in: backend architecture, JS, API design, and documentation. I continue to maintain and improve the suite, have had contributors pick up the repos, and have pushed upstream PRs to SquadJS itself to fix critical edge cases.

Profiling is non-negotiable. In real-time systems, FPS and memory are the constraints everything else is designed around. I treat the profiler as a development tool, not a diagnostic one.

I'm pragmatic about performance. Ruthless optimization comes at the cost of development time. That cost is real and often ignored. I think about complexity in three dimensions: time, space, and development overhead. The right solution balances all three. Premature optimization is waste. I optimize when it measurably matters.

I'm functional-minded in my OOP. Abstraction is slower to execute, harder to maintain, and harder to understand when overdone. I prefer clear, direct code with minimal layers over elegant architecture that obscures what's actually happening. The wrong abstraction is worse than no abstraction. I'm cautious about refactoring systems that are stable but imperfect.

At Pansimula, I'm currently prototyping and pitching new game concepts, while maintaining our released titles.

I actively explore AI-assisted development tools to stay current and relevant. When used well it's a force multiplier. When used poorly it generates tech debt faster than any developer could alone. I'm genuinely concerned about the quality of code accumulating across the industry, and that concern shapes how I use these tools.