Hi, I'm Steve. I've been writing this blog since January 2000, which makes it older than Facebook, YouTube and my sons.

Who actually wrote this blog

1. 2000 to 2004
   Me, by hand.

   Short posts about search, blogs, Microsoft and knowledge management, because it was 2003 and those were the only four topics on the internet. 342 posts that year. I had a lot of opinions and no editor.

2. 2004 to 2008
   del.icio.us.

   Of the 682 posts from 2005 to 2007, 674 are automated “links for” roundups. My most prolific co-author was a bookmarking site with periods in its name.

3. 2010 to 2014
   A WordPress plugin that reposted my tweets.

   422 of the 522 posts from 2010 to 2012 are “Daily Twitter Updates.” Bold content strategy. Would not recommend.

4. 2015 to 2024
   Almost nobody.

   41 posts in ten years. I was at Amazon. Amazon has opinions about your evenings.

5. 2025 to now
   Me again, with Claude helping.

   Long essays about AI. 2026 is already the biggest year in the blog’s history by word count, from 18 posts. It turns out you write more when you stop letting software post for you. Ironic, given the help.

The day job

I spent about 18 years at Amazon, which is long enough to work at four different companies without ever changing badges. I started at Audible, then moved to Amazon Prime, then Core AI, and finished in AWS leading engineering teams on generative AI, including Amazon Bedrock. That last stretch mostly meant explaining to smart people that the model is not the product.

Along the way I was a Bar Raiser, the interviewer Amazon puts in every hiring loop to make sure each new hire is better than the last. I interviewed over 1,100 candidates. That’s more than one a week for 18 years. Colleagues called it my second job. My calendar called it my first. (An earlier draft of this page said 11,000, which would have been a dozen a week. Catching that kind of thing was literally my job.)

I came out with my name on 11 patents (content delivery, audiobook production, machine learning), a permanent belief that mechanisms beat good intentions, and an inability to start a meeting without a six-page document. I’m told this last one is treatable.

These days I’m Head of AI Engineering at Guardian Life. Guardian has been around since 1860, which makes this blog the younger of us, barely.

Before Amazon

I came up in the dot-com years, when a domain name and a logo counted as a business plan. I built community sites before anyone called it social media, back when a “social network” was a guestbook, a chat room and a hit counter you checked more often than you’d admit. I started a few companies too. The internet was a smaller town then, and everybody knew your URL.

Also, I own yourmom.com. Someday I’ll tell that story. Today is not that day.

Things I build on the side

Mostly things that annoyed me first. My GitHub bio says I’m “obsessed with how AI coding is democratizing software.” My family says I’m on the laptop again. Both are accurate.

• Banjo is an AI that makes phone calls so I don’t have to. It’s named after our terrier, who also doesn’t make phone calls but has strong opinions about the mail carrier.
• The World Cup, Tour de France and Vuelta dashboards exist because finding out which streaming service has stage 14 should not require a search party.
• The compound interest calculator was built to teach my 20-year-old sons about compound interest. They were thrilled. Mostly about the sliders.
• Art Hanger tells you how high to hang a picture. It ends one argument and, in my experience, starts another.
• Robotron 2084 is a browser replica of a 1982 arcade game, for those of us still owed quarters.

Then there’s the stuff you can’t see, because it isn’t public:

• A Hacker News app for iOS, written in Swift, that reads the front page so I don’t have to and hands me an AI-written daily digest tuned to what I actually care about. It has better taste than I do, and it’s more polite about it.
• PhotoCurator, a native macOS app that uses AI to find the keepers in a few thousand photos and make them look better. It is brutally honest about my framing.
• A small fleet of internal tools and services that exist purely for my own convenience.

They stay private until I think someone else might find them useful. Or pay for them. Mostly the second one.

Other things you should know

• The mountain bike in this blog’s old header photo is an accurate picture of how I’d like to spend weekends.
• I once burned through a month of Claude usage in four days, then wrote it up as a Star Wars story. I regret nothing. My billing page regrets plenty.
• I have a GitHub repo from 2013 called donuts. Its entire description is “I love donuts.” My position has not changed, and has since grown into The Holy Order of the Donut. In glaze we trust.
• I write about music and photography whenever technology picks a fight with them, which is constantly.