Hire Me

This page details my skills and experience for those potentially wanting to hire me in various fields. If you'd like a traditional resume for my primary field as a software developer, see: My Resume

Otherwise, I've included a broad spread of information about myself below; select whichever options in the index are most relevant to the position in question. If this page is missing details you'd need to know, please contact me, I'm happy to chat in more depth.

And if you end up deciding not to hire me, I always appreciate learning why. You can leave me an anonymous message here.

About Me

I come from a math-heavy background; my father was a mathematician at the University of Florida, and I grew up playing around with things like Scratch and all the games he would ambush me with. My mother loves to tell people the story of how when I was two-ish years old, playing with a necklace pendant I had been given, a neighbor came and asked me what I was playing with, and I proudly said "It's an icosahedron!".

As a kid I got really into Minecraft, building elaborate redstone creationsMy favorite was probably my fuel-less autosmelter, capable of smelting 1 item per tick with less than 2 seconds of latency from input to output. (This is common nowadays, but this was years ago, before Scicraft made theirs.) and reporting so many bugs on their bug tracker that Mojang invited me to join the triage team. I also frequented a large multiplayer server called ThingHunter, and completely broke their economic system; I made so much in-game currency via arbitrage that they thought I must have hacked the currency plugin and banned me until I explained what happened.For a very similar story, see Alice Mazzy's excellent Playing to Win.

In my teens I moved away from Minecraft and started playing Magic: The Gathering, particularly drawn to its incredibly complex 200-page rulebook and its surprisingly professional judge community. I quickly become one of the best in the world at knowledge of the rulebook, and for a few years I made a living as a professional judge on their Grand Prix circuit, where I also met my future partner. I started vending Magic cards in that time as well, through which I was able to buy a house in BC with said partner. A little while later, I discovered the misprint community; a fascinating collecting niche that resulting in me learning all about offset lithography in order to understand and authenticate misprints.

As Covid hit and Wizards of the Coast scaled back on Magic events, I discovered Manifold Markets, joining just a few months after the site first launched. I absolutely loved the culture of intellectual curiosity combined with hard empiricism that we fostered there, and I was appointed a site moderator as soon as the position came to exist. I couldn't possibly describe all of the weird stuff we got up to there; I think my favorite was the hybrid code golf/open-source game theory tournament I organized, pitting 62 human-written computer programs against each other for a prize in the site currency. I maintained 1st place on the global Manifold forecasting leaderboard for many months, and 1st place on the question creation leaderboard for several years after that.

Recently I've started to take a step back from these hobbies, searching for something a little more meaningful. I have yet to decide what that will be.

Computer programming

I'm a self-taught programmer, which does mean I'll be a little less familiar with common frameworks than you might normally expect, but also demonstrates that I'm capable of self-directed learning and picking things up quickly. (This was before the advent of AI; I learned by experiment and reading documentation.) My largest project is RulesGuru, a platform for procedural generation of custom Magic: The Gathering rules questions. It comprises more than 80,000 lines of code, has thousands of users from more than a dozen different countries, and has been adopted as one of the primary learning resources for the Magic judge program. It can generate trillions of valid rules question & answer pairs, which has resulted in several different teams working on Magic AI reaching out to me about using it as training data. Most of the work was done myself, but recently we received a grant from Judge Foundry, which required me to hire and manage a team of developers to work on the project.

Some other things I've done:

With the advent of AI coding tools I've been testing them out to improve my productivity, mostly Claude Code. It's been very helpful at answering syntax questions and creating boilerplate functions to e.g. call a certain API, and has definitely sped me up significantly on those tasks. But I've found it mostly useless for more complex problem-solving, and thus have stopped using it for core programming tasks, as I think it slows me down.

Most of my experience is with core web technologies like CSS and Javascript/Node.js, but I've fiddled with some others as well. I wrote a simple Minecraft mod in Java for a video I was producing, used some SQL on the back-end of RulesGuru, helped a friend pass his course on C (claims he wouldn't have been able to pass without my guidance), and I'm currently working on a computer game in GDScript.

While I don't have professional experience in the field, I try to stay up-to-date with basic computer security, and have written a few articles on the subject.

I run my own mailserver for my blog.

Research/Investigations

In 2024 I discovered that a company I had done contract work for several times was defrauding hundreds of its own customers and employees. I contacted them privately multiple times to ask for an explanation and give them a chance to fix the situation; when they did neither I wrote up my findings to inform the community, which led to the collapse of the company.

I'm the type of person who reads Wikipedia articles and research papers for fun. I frequently find myself fact-checking claims I come across in the media or online and writing up my findings. A few examples:

On April 1st 2023, I published an article to demonstrate the power of paltering, using only true statements to convince quite a few of my acquaintances of a false conclusion. I followed this up with another article explaining every strategy I had used to trick them.

My experience as a Magic judge requires us to perform adversarial investigations, where we must collect evidence to determine if a player is cheating or made an honest mistake. The judge program takes this seriously; see for example this three-part series on how to apply the scientific method to these investigations.

I spend a fair bit of time working with AI, and have a good understanding of what they can and can't do. I try to make sure my acquaintances understand the risks of trusting them, and also the utility of using them in careful ways. I've had some luck asking AIs to research topics for me; they hallucinate so many facts in their answer, but I can verify the links they provide, and often this is faster than finding them myself.

I wrote a detailed article on the economics of Magic tournaments.

For more of my writing, see my homepage.

Magic Judging

I have been judging Magic events since 2014, for much of that time being one of the top 100 most active judges on large events worldwide. I'm experienced with pretty much all formats, including cEDH. I'm known as one of the foremost experts worldwide on the CR.

I don't maintain an up-to-date list of references, as some judges may not feel comfortable recommending me if we haven't worked together in a long time. So below are some judges who, as of the last time I asked them, were happy to recommend me.The judge program is too in-flux for me to keep up with everyone's levels under various programs, so I list the highest level they've had at any point.

General Trustworthiness and Integrity

For financial situations:

For non-financial integrity:

Physical Tasks

I am in good health and capable of helping with the average physical task here and there. I am frequently on my feet for more than 8 hours a day.

My partner and I did significant renovations on our house ourselves after purchasing it, including installing new flooring, mixing and pouring concrete to fix potholes in the driveway and install a post, building and tiling a new shower, installing sinks and fixing leaks in the old ones, putting up new trim, and similar. As a result I know how to use a variety of common tools; circular saw, jigsaw, etc.

I am nearsighted, but have glasses so this is generally not an issue. I am ambidextrous.Genetically right-handed, but I choose to use my left as my primary for most things, so am about equally proficient with both as a result.

I can legally drive, and know how to ride a bicycle.

I'm a decent swimmer and know how to ski, though to be honest if either of these is relevant for your position I'm going to have some questions.

Miscellaneous

I am a US and a Canadian citizen, and can legally work in both countries.

I've been editing Wikipedia since 2013.

I will be/was (depending on when you're reading this) one of the speakers at Metagame, a weekend conference-slash-retreat for programmers and game designers.

In my 10 years of Magic judging experience, I've been a part of dozens of teams of anywhere from 3 to 100 judges, often leading them myself. These events are fast-paced and require significant flexibility to handle unexpected events, along with significant advance planning, creating complex schedules while accommodating everyone's preferences, all with tens of thousands of dollars on the line for the hundreds or thousands of competitors.

In my work on RulesGuru, I've had to manage two separate teams; one team of writers generating question content, and one team of developers adding website features. I also handled hiring for the developers, designing an application and figuring out how to evaluate them, and then got to directly observe their output once accepted.

I've represented myself in two small claims lawsuits, against an individual and a company who tried to defraud me and my partner.

I got a 173 on a previous year's LSAT on Lawhub, taken with no prior study or outside assistance. (I only didn't take the real one because I didn't want to violate their overly-restrictive terms and conditions.)

I started work on an online puzzle game with a friend, put on hiatus after preliminary playtesting as she wanted to focus on another project. You can play a prototype here.

In my time collecting and vending Magic cards, I learned a significant amount about offset lithography, and became recognized as one of the best authenticators for cards worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

After frequenting a game store in Florida, Gamesville TabletopSince renamed to Coliseum of Comics., they asked me to work for them. I accepted and worked retail and event management there for several months. I wasn't a good fit for retail salesperson, but the position gave me a good feel for what goes into managing an inventory, designing appealing product layouts, etc.

I have a semi-popular account on Twitter/X, where I talk about mostly science, psychology, statistics, and gaming. I'm followed by quite a few influential people in the tech and academic world.

Some articles that I'm particularly proud of:

I designed the comprehensive rulebook for Celestial TCG.

One of my articles was linked on Bryne Hobart's The Diff.

The "Resume" link at the top was written by AI, obviously. I hate buzzwords, but enough recruiters told me that the lack of them was a factor in their decisions that I decided fiiiiiine, I'll include it. (Don't worry, I removed all the hallucinated facts about me that it insisted on inserting.)

Availability and Pricing Expectations

I have a flexible schedule and am available for many types of work: short-term or long-term positions, full or part time, remote or in person. For time-sensitive tasks, I am likely available to start within a day or two of being contacted.

I have a slight preference for short-term over long-term positions, and a stronger preference for part-time over full-time, and remote over on-site. I'm perfectly willing to accept any type of position, but these preferences will affect the prices I would accept. (If I sent you this page directly as part of my application for a job you posted, you can ignore the following text and assume that I'm comfortable with whatever price your position advertised.)

For remote jobs, I would generally expect USD $40-$60 an hour for part-time, or $70-$100 for full-time. For on-site jobs that require relocation (temporarily or permanently), I would need to take home at least $100 per hour after subtracting the cost of living in that location. (For salaried positions, just estimate how many hours a year I'll be working and multiply.)

These prices are estimates; the actual price I'll be willing to accept will depend heavily on how much I enjoy the position. I've been known to work for as low as minimum wage when the job involves doing the sort of thing that I might do anyway in my spare time. (I'm also open to task-based compensation structures instead of time-based, if that's a better fit for what you're doing.)

In general, I like positions that have a high degree of autonomy and involve solving challenging problems or learning interesting facts about the world. I particularly enjoy tasks that relate to science or gaming, and those that have a clear positive impact on others. I dislike positions that require interfacing with poorly-designed software, seem detrimental to society, or require me to interact socially with boring people.

I will never be offended by an offer that is too low, so please do not hesitate to reach out. At worst I will simply decline.

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