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A Year of Decisions at Knapsack

Last year, I made the decision to join Knapsack, a design systems startup, as a Staff Engineer.

"You did WHAT?"

Is the first comment I get from friends and folks in my network. I get it ! I was "fiercely independent" for about a decade. Building startups and consulting with amazing record labels, game devs and other non-enterprise folk.

Well here's my summary: I went looking for the AI-native action, and found that – in three different ways – everywhere I expected the action to be, it had already moved: from the delivery surface to the decision surface.

Two Perspectives on UXDX NYC: An Engineer's Perspective

Originally published on the Knapsack blog

This post first appeared on the Knapsack blog on June 4, 2026, as the second of two UXDX NYC recaps — Carly's designer's perspective came first.

Last week, Carly's recap of UXDX NYC landed on the line "AI is an amplifier of whatever discipline you brought with you."

Here's mine from the engineering seat — three days, eight tracks, and a room that kept arguing about the same thing in different costumes: tension and what to do with it.

Mapping the songwriter family tree with small data

Adapted from my talk at Small Data SF 2025

This post is adapted from my talk at Small Data SF on November 5, 2025, "Uncharted: Building a Semantic Layer + MCP to Map 1.7M Songwriter Connections with Claude Code." Watch the talk on YouTube.

If you've heard of Kanye West, Taylor Swift, Quincy Jones, or Justin Vernon, you've been touched by a problem most people never pay attention to: who wrote the song, and who they wrote it with. This is about how I went after that problem with small data.

A survey of MCP patterns and evolving practices

(Data collected May 26–29, 2025)

Since its introduction in November of 2024, the Model Context Protocol has been hailed as the "USB of AI applications". While its not nearly as ubiquitous as those wonderful little ports, its certainly growing in momentum.

Google Trends interest in "MCP" over time

Google Trends interest in "MCP" over time

I've been a user of MCPs since the standard was first introduced in November of 2024, and have built a handful of private, internal MCP servers for clients since then.

I'm now working on my first public MCP implementations and that led me to wonder: what are the emerging trends and best practices regarding MCP definition?

A General-Purpose Python AI Development Environment

(Updated May 13, 2025)

I was watching popular AI-trending youtuber Matthew Berman build a local environment for AI development the other day. And it was amazing how issues like virtual environments, package mangement and versioned dependencies were huge pain points and hurdles.

It occured to me that with all the excitement about AI and tooling, that there's common issues that folks who aren't used to the command line may run into – and be stopped dead in their tracks.