After serving as Director of Engineering at Shopify, I stepped back over the course of 2025 and 2026 to focus on a new direction. I spent this time immersed in deep research, design, and nature—seeking a foundational understanding of our planet's urgent ecological needs and exploring how non-traditional engineering can help protect it.

I am sharing what I've been working for historical purposes. It is a look at what I have been building, investigating, and testing along the way.

Ecological Bioacoustics: Listening to the Land

Inspired by the late Dr. Karen Bakker’s work in The Sounds of Life, I have been researching acoustic ecology—specifically, how soundscapes can be leveraged to nurture biodiversity and strengthen our agricultural and forest systems.

Through field tests on accessible private land, I developed targeted acoustic arrays and non-invasive sound projection devices to clear environmental noise clutter and stimulate crop health. The results were immediate: we saw thriving cherry trees and successful winter tomato yields on land that had shown zero growth over the previous five years.

Mindful Computing & Minimalist Hardware

To cultivate deep focus amidst major life transitions and past stresses, I spent time redesigning my relationship with computing—both at the cognitive layer and the system hardware layer.

  • The Daltu Interface: I engineered a custom workspace tool called the Daltu Board, named after the ancient Semitic word (daltu) for "door" or "gateway"—the historical ancestor of the Greek Delta (Δ). Built as a modern digital chalkboard to help me work in peace, it featured a real-time, Galileo-inspired planetary alignment clock, hyper-localized solar/lunar tracking, and identity visualization tools. (While I no longer use the astronomical clock today—having returned to simply watching the sun rise and fall—it was essential to finding focus when I needed it most.)
  • High-Efficiency Compute: On the system level, I spent time investigating how to get radically more out of less by leveraging low-level CPU operations. By pairing a legacy ThinkPad X250 with aggressive low-power Linux optimizations, I achieved 8+ hours of continuous high-performance compute on minimal energy draw—matching what I would normally expect from a modern MacBook Air and proving that lean software design often outperforms hardware upgrades.

Sovereign, Curated AI Systems

Instead of relying on massive, centralized AI models trained on everything at once, I design sovereign, hyper-focused AI systems built to run locally on a single machine.

By indexing curated academic literature and private research, I build specialized conversational engines tuned to specific thinkers—such as a Charles Darwin model customized strictly around private, domain-specific data. These localized models are designed to tackle highly focused challenges:

  • Optimizing food seed germination
  • Developing localized wildfire defense and forest survival strategies
  • Improving plant disease control
  • Preserving and scaling creative breakthroughs from private working groups

Long-term, I envisage this framework serving as a digital proxy—a custom, scalable extension of my own knowledge and research capable of executing parallel work across complex environmental systems.

Geophysical Analysis & Planetary Dynamics

I have been aggregating global seismic and volcanic data to build predictive pattern-detection models, aiming to develop early-warning systems similar to modern meteorology.

A critical, ongoing unknown in this research is the dramatic surge in atmospheric electrical activity. Tracking live data from network sources like Blitzortung, I observed global lightning counts scale from roughly 5,000 strikes every two hours to upwards of 70,000 strikes every two hours. My current work investigates how this continuous electromagnetic discharge and sub-surface energy absorption may correlate with tectonic instability and core thermal dynamics.

Severe Weather Mitigation: Micro-Climate Interventions

To protect vulnerable cities, farms, and families from severe weather, I designed a compact, bottle-sized atmospheric intervention device built to disrupt tornado formation at the source.


                    [ TORNADO FORMATION ]
                             ||
    +------------------------||------------------------+
    |                        \/                        |
    |          [ High-Energy Vortex Edge ]            |
    |                        ||                        |
    +------------------------||------------------------+
                             ||
                     ( Rapid Deployment )
                             ||
                             \/
        +------------------------------------------+
        |   Micro-Front Ejection (Dry Ice / N2)    |
        +------------------------------------------+
                             ||
                   ( Thermal & Pressure Drop )
                             ||
                             \/
             [ Disrupted Vortex / Collapsed Front ]

Deployment Network: The low-power, solar-charged units can be mounted on regional towers surrounding high-risk areas. When an oncoming vortex triggers the onboard pressure sensors, the system automatically fires.

Mechanism: The device rapidly ejects a dry-ice or nitrogen compound high into the atmosphere, creating a localized micro-front. Introducing this sudden, ultra-low-temperature air directly into the edge of the vortex alters the surrounding pressure differential, collapsing the tornado's thermal engine before it reaches critical infrastructure.

Beyond severe storm suppression, this micro-front deployment methodology opens up broad possibilities for micro-scale weather adaptation and localized environmental protection.

I am currently wrapping up this phase of independent field research and happy to share it for others to work on in the future. No country, no university, or other organization wants me to work on this. Therefore I will never return to this research ever.