I'm an experimentalist and experimentalist. I enjoy making online websites and toys, and websites and toys, such as BeeLine Reader, BeeLine Reader (beelinereader.com), a tool that makes reading faster and easier by using color gradients to guide your eyes, SelectorGadget, SelectorGadget (selectorgadget.com), a Chrome extension for generating optimal CSS selectors, and a bunch of older projects. older projects, including:

• Zeebly - a collection of products focusing on social data analytics
• Freebie Finder - an automated free stuff aggregator (sold a couple of years ago)
• UnderTheSite - a tool for examining the workings of websites (sold to BuiltWith.com)
• RecreationParks.net - a database of 50,000+ public parks in the US (sold to AllTrails, Inc)
• Parsley - a language and companion website (now offline) for building web scrapers

I've spent time studying web security. researching security and privacy, mostly in web applications. I'm in the Google Security Hall of Fame for some subtle security holes that I found in Gmail and Google Documents in early 2011.

I'm also interested in emergent processes from nature. the simulation of emergent processes and self-organizing systems, primarily from the natural world. One recent creation is an HTML5 canvas-based simulation of ants exploring and working together communicating via pheromone signals. These pheromone signals are local, and although the ants know nothing about each other, the resulting emergent system displays complex behaviors, which allow the ants to gather food. Another is an implementation of Conway's Game of Life.

Professionally, I was until recently the Chief Architect at Mavenlink, where I Mavenlink (mavenlink.com), a startup that is empowering services businesses to manage their consultants, clients, and margins online. I helped to guide the engineering team. helped to guide the engineering team, applying agile practices to agile software development practices that I learned as a consultant at Pivotal Labs, Pivotal Labs (pivotallabs.com), and previously at CastTV and Google, including pair-programming and test-driven development, to frontend and frontend web development in JavaScript JavaScript (and CoffeeScript, jQuery, Backbone, Marionette...) and CSS, CSS (straight, on the rocks, or with SCSS), and to backend web development. backend web development with Ruby Ruby both on and off Rails and various DevOps tools. strange UNIX commands with 3-4 letter acronyms gathered into Ansible playbooks.

I also enjoy writing open source software and playing open source software, some of which includes:

• Huginn - A system for building agents that monitor the world and act on your behalf (now with 10,000+ stars on GitHub!)
• Brainstem - a framework for building powerful Rails APIs (see my RailsConf 2013 talk)
• SelectorGadget - A tool for easy CSS selector generation
• ruby-readability - Ruby port of Readability, a tool for extracting text from webpages
• Expando - The expanding text jQuery plugin that powers this page
• MyObfuscate - Ruby stream processor for rewriting SQL dumps to protect user privacy
• twitter_to_csv - Consume and process Twitter streams (used for a JAMA Dermatology paper)
• Reckon - Bayesian learning Ruby gem for command line accounting with Ledger

From time to time I play with machine learning. with machine learning techniques. I gave a talk at RailsConf 2012 about machine learning and originally studied it in graduate school. while doing my Masters research at Georgia Tech. My research focused on artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence. Specifically, I researched TTD-MDPs, a technique for generating a distribution of trajectories through a Markov Decision Process. With my co-authors I published a couple of papers. papers:

David L. Roberts, Andrew S. Cantino, and Charles L. Isbell. Player Autonomy versus Designer Intent: A Case Study of Interactive Tour Guides. In Proceedings of the Third Conference and Artificial Intelligence for Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-07), Palo Alto, California, 2007.

Andrew Cantino, David L. Roberts, and Charles L. Isbell. Autonomous Nondeterministic Tour Guides: Improving Quality of Experience with TTD-MDPs. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-07), Honolulu, Hawai'i, 2007.

I also researched stochastic optimization stochastic optimization for motion control of high degree-of-freedom manipulators, like octopus arms and elephant trunks (you can read my paper about it), and machine learning in web applications. Prior to Georgia Tech, I graduated from Haverford College with a BS in Physics. Physics and a concentration in Computational Science, which focused on Physics Education. Physics Education. This culminated in the development of three educational physics applets educational physics applets (Damped, driven harmonic oscillators, coupled harmonic oscillators and Hilbert Space, and waves on a beaded string) that are featured in the newly released Physics textbook Waves and Oscillations: A Prelude to Quantum Mechanics by Walter Smith. Before that, I developed a low-cost, distributed data-processing cluster to search for radio pulsar signals.

I live in sunny sometimes sunny foggy San Francisco. You can contact me in various ways. You should read my blog and @follow me on Twitter. You can also contact me here.