That's the official title. The 40-odd open-source projects, three companies, seven invented algorithms, and the occasional TV crew quietly disagree — though I'd never be the one to bring it up. (The footer keeps me honest.)
Jeff builds across an unreasonable spread of fields — artificial intelligence and genetics, graph databases, GPU computing, amateur radio, and the open social web. The common thread was never a technology. It's the stubborn suspicion that a hard problem is solvable if you stare at it long enough.
Over twenty-five years he's been an engineer, a project lead, and a CTO — once responsible for an entire company's IP portfolio, at peak directing dozens of engineers at a time. He founded three companies (Swapoo, Syncleus, and CleverThis) and has been quoted on newspaper front pages and live television around the world. He'd like it on record that he finds all of this slightly embarrassing.
Most hard problems are the same problem wearing different clothes. Social networks, package dependencies, routing a packet across a mesh of radios — it's all secretly a graph. I just keep noticing the edges other people walk straight past.
Reproduced here with the footnotes the original sorely lacked.
Fluent in roughly nine languages — Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Bash, Assembly, C, C++ and friends. Fluent in none of them before the first coffee.
An early adopter of things you'll Google next year. Active across NoSQL, graph databases, GPU compute, Docker, and the kind of AI that keeps researchers up at night.
Has explained graph databases on live television. Featured on the front page of USA Today and across CNBC, MSNBC, Fortune, and a few more stages than is strictly reasonable.
25 years of shipping software, including a stint as CTO running an entire company's IP portfolio. The early years were character-building. We don't open those repos.
Has directed dozens of engineers at once and returned all of them in working order. Leadership, it turns out, is mostly knowing when to get out of the way.
Three companies under his belt — Swapoo, Syncleus, and CleverThis. That's two more than most people finish, and roughly three more than he intended.
Member, and in some cases Advisory Committee member, for the standards bodies that keep the web and the industry honest.
W3C Advisory Committee
ITU member
ISO member
ANSI member
IEEE Senior Member
ACM Senior Member
ASIS&T member
Active participation in standards development, protocol design, and technical governance across the web stack, from ActivityPub and the Fediverse to graph-database query languages and open radio protocols.
Founder and owner of a frankly excessive array of libraries and applications. Six worth a closer look:
An AI and artificial-genetics library of conventional and decidedly unconventional algorithms. The project that started a habit.
Executes native Java code on the GPU — because sometimes the CPU is just standing there, not pulling its weight.
A TinkerPop 2 & 3 abstraction layer for graph databases. Makes graphs behave like objects, and objects behave.
A Mastodon fork with extra features powering a real Fediverse community. ActivityPub, but more so.
An open-source, open-standards incubator for ham radio. Yes, the analog kind. Yes, it's wonderful.
A Spacemacs config optimized for information density and, unapologetically, beauty. Editors should spark joy.
Jeff is a technical genius — one of the smartest scientists I have ever met. He is going to achieve great things.
A brilliant developer and software architect, but also an innovator — one of the most forward-thinking people I know, constantly addressing hard problems few others are thinking about.
A strategic thinker with exceptional technical skills. He was instrumental in helping my company develop business requirements and a cost-effective technology solution.
Both are excellent outcomes. One of them involves me, which I'm reliably told is a selling point.