The longer version

In May 2015, two friends and I started Sickboy at the Halifax library. That's eleven years ago now. It's a podcast about living with illness, and it's a lot funnier than that sounds. We had no plan. People listened anyway, it went on to win some awards, and we're still making it. I feel lucky about that pretty much every week.

Sickboy grew into Snack Labs, the podcast company I co-founded. We make shows for health organizations and businesses trying to do some good, and I do a little of everything: strategy, client work, our internal tools, the website. I still get a kick out of calling it my job.

Along the way I helped start two more companies: Showrunner, which helps people make podcasts with AI, and OslerAI, where medical students practise with simulated patients.

During COVID I tried dropshipping, and the thing I picked to sell was a water bottle for dogs. People actually bought them. I'm still a little amazed.

Writing titles is a big part of what we do, and I could never tell whether they made a difference. So I made a whole podcast to find out, tried teaching a model to help us pick them and wrote a paper about who titles are really for. I'm still not totally sure, which is probably why I keep at it.

My mom once spent two hours on hold trying to cancel her cable, and I couldn't stop thinking about it. So I built a bot that called Eastlink over and over for a month and timed how long it took to reach a person. At 8 a.m. it took a few minutes. Around 3 p.m. it took two and a half hours.

She called at 8:15 on a Tuesday and got through in seven minutes. Afterward she pointed out that she could have just waited on hold like a normal person. She's not wrong.

The summer I started running, I strapped sensors to my legs and built an app to compare my stride with Eliud Kipchoge's. I'd never opened Blender before, and learned it just to turn race footage of him into something my phone could read. I named the score the Kipchoge Similarity Index before I'd built anything that could work it out, which tells you a lot about me.

I love computers, the hardware as much as the software, and I love design. After fifteen years of learning on the job, I went back to school for computer science at the University of Arizona, focusing on AI. I'm having the best time. Learning is so much more fun when you choose it.

It's also a great excuse to make things, like a detector for fake podcast voices, a claw machine where the prizes are jobs and a contract that treats stillness as consent.

There's a Raspberry Pi hanging on an IKEA pegboard on my wall, in a case I 3D printed. It handles customer support and marketing for a business, day and night, and it hasn't complained once. It might be the best thing I've built.

I bounce between projects, and I forget half of them until I find the folder months later. This is where I keep track of what I've been up to lately. Thanks for reading all of this. If you're curious, everything I've made is over here.