I am Conrad Buck (also known as conartist6): a software engineer, open source maintainer, and currently full time self-employed inventor.
I specialize in the creation of tools and platforms, with a particular attention to human factors both in the process of software develpment and in the way software affects the lives of the people who use it. I have an abiding love of all things playful, and see deep symmetry between the artistic, scientific, and engineering processes. I am a private pilot.
Between the 2012 and 2020 I was a Frontend Engineer based in San Francisco, where I worked for MyVR, Spruce Media, Switchfly, VMWare, Facebook, and Plangrid (departed due to pandemic). I have most (-.5 credits) of a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science degree from Bucknell University. A full accounting of this history is on LinkedIn.
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Program transformation: This is my main line of research, and investigates the way that generator functions can be used to define nearly infinitely extensible parsers. This research will change the world, but unfortuantely for my bank account it cannot be sold.
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Loose coupling: All my tools operate over data streams, which allows them to define algorithms that are completely decoupled from concerns of data storage. I see this kind of decoupling as key to sustainability in software ecosystems.
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Philosophy of software development: I study the set of often-conflicting principles that engineers use to justify technical decisions. I am particularly interested in how specific technical decisions can be traced back to a combination of principles and circumstances that provides organizations and engineers visibility into what have traditionally been tremendous blind spots.