VP of Engineering at Omada Health. Advisor at Berkeley SkyDeck.
I write about engineering leadership, distributed systems, AI/ML adoption, Ruby, Go, PostgreSQL, and open source. I’ve spent the last decade building and scaling engineering organizations in digital health.
Quick follow-up to the college search post. Last time, I gave up on fine-tuning a generative model and built a DistilBERT classifier instead. The classifier works great (100% precision, 100% recall), but I always had this nagging feeling that fine-tuning should have worked if I’d found the right model and the right tooling. Today Liquid AI released LFM2.5-350M, and it changes the picture. ...
College search is a 10-dimensional optimization problem that families solve with spreadsheets, gut feelings, and way too many browser tabs. My kid wants to study biology, play D1 soccer, and ideally not pay more than $40K/year. Oh, and not biomedical, just bio. That’s four constraints already. Add in state preferences, school size, acceptance rates, graduation rates, application systems (Common App? ApplyTexas? UC?), and now you’re juggling variables that don’t fit in your head. ...
Originally posted as a thread on X. I was reading that 8090 just landed a partnership with EY last week, and this got me interested in test-driving it. Most of the coverage out there focuses on enterprise usage, I wanted to know if it could help me on an open source project (no budget, PMs, just me/Claude/my repos.) And if this is good for thousands of consultants, maybe it could also be good for the day job. I’ll start by saying that I liked the pitch: the bottleneck in (a lot of, not all obviously) software is deciding what to build, not writing the code. 8090 wants to be the single source of truth that connects product decisions to engineering execution: a gap that’s more or less narrow in various companies, and that doesn’t exist in side projects (where I’m the CEO/CFO/engineer/QA/product marketing person all at once.) ...
This blog has been running Jekyll since 2014. It served me well for years, but the theme was showing its age, the tooling felt stuck, and I wanted something faster and more modern. So I migrated to Hugo. One theme per decade I guess. ...