From cosmic rays to product systems

The domains have changed a lot: cosmic-ray data, clinical bioinformatics, email infrastructure, AI systems. The work has felt more continuous than it looks from the outside.

In each setting, the job is to understand a messy system well enough to make a useful interface for it. Sometimes that interface is an analysis pipeline. Sometimes it is a product surface. Sometimes it is the small operational loop that makes the rest of the system trustworthy.

Systems first

The material matters. If the product ignores the underlying system, the interface eventually becomes decorative. If the interface ignores the person using it, the system stays trapped inside itself.

The interesting work lives between those two constraints.