origins
Two things shaped me early: my first computer, an Apple IIGS, and a shelf of reference works — the Great Books of the Western World, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Compton's Encyclopedia. A machine to explore with, and a canon to explore. I learned to program on LPMuds, writing LPC on Unix servers, and grew up on Linux and IRC — as dunedain. Those are the two roots of everything since: the engineering instinct, and the pull toward gathering and retrieving knowledge — which is, in the end, what nano and this site are.

I studied Biological Sciences at the University of Chicago (B.A.), and later earned an M.B.A. from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. But before nano.com (1999) and this site (2001), the open-source work proper began at Chicago — in two research worlds, one computational, one biological.

Parallel scientific computing — the Planguage project
In L. Ridgway Scott's group I worked on Planguage — the Pfortran and PC translators: an explicitly-parallel programming model for scientific and engineering codes (parallel dialects of Fortran 77 and C, with a lineage reaching back to 1986). This is where a taste for numerical methods and high-performance computation took hold — the same sensibility behind the Simplex, Metropolis-Hastings and Markov code later posted on this site. The project page is, remarkably, still online.

Evolutionary physiology — Martin Feder's lab
In Martin Feder's lab I worked on Hsp70 heat-shock proteins in Drosophila — the experimental, evolutionary-physiology side: thermal stress, protein expression, adaptation. The lab's original pages are preserved in the Internet Archive.

Biology and high-performance computing, side by side. That pairing is the through-line to everything here — nano's relevance engine, and the open-source below. The first public release out of that period was the Porter stemmer in Python (January 2001), still credited on Martin Porter's own page.

A 2026 retrospective, added while restoring this site. I was a student researcher in these groups and make no claim of authorship on their publications — this is simply where the work began.