holsee
I'm 20+ years deep building and shipping software of all shapes and sizes, commercial and open source.
I have a particular interest in distributed, fault-tolerant, concurrent systems and applied AI. My go-to weapons of choice centre around the BEAM for this very reason (if you know you know), but I gladly reach for the correct tool for the job. At one point in my career I left big finance and took a pay cut to join a cyber-security firm for no other reason than to get professional exposure as an Erlang engineer. I enjoy programming languages, language design and theory, and I don't feel constrained to individual specialisations, although for over a decade I went extremely deep in the .NET space, and for another decade have been shipping solutions oriented around the BEAM and Elixir as a default. It has been a good time.
I'm riding the agentic wave as an accelerationist and an optimist, with a healthy dose of experience in establishing AI ethics boards and an applied understanding of alignment. I enjoy pushing the limits of what AI can do in engineering and product, having spent years deep in research seeking generational improvements on early models through the dark arts of platform-level prompt engineering and hackery: less important now with the state of the art, but useful nonetheless when it comes to getting the most from smaller models.
I believe successful systems come from good, low-friction methods of collaboration between contributors, including in commercial settings. The role of engineering is changing rapidly, and I'm a firm believer in the skills good engineers bring to a world where the mechanical execution of code authorship can be accelerated through agentic tooling.
This site covers a good chunk of my experience and the projects I'm able to share publicly. There is more about me on the about page.
Start here
All writing →- Thinking Like an Erlanger: the mental shift that makes the BEAM make sense.
- ElixirConfEU: Elixir Processes in 3D: a lightning talk in Kraków, and how to watch 5,000 BEAM processes spawn in three dimensions.
The long view
- Timeline: every position, project, talk and library since 2007, dated, from the same files as the CV.
- Now: what is on the bench this month.