Recent work and interests
Sidekick is the LLM assistant inside the Shopify admin, and my work is on the surrounding tooling that decides how AI shows up across the rest of the merchant experience. Commerce is a fascinating place for AI to land: the users aren't engineers, the stakes are real, and trust is the bottleneck on everything interesting. The hard problem isn't whether the model can do the task. It's whether someone running a real store will let it.
Before Shopify, I spent seven months on Firefox's privacy team, which I cannot recommend highly enough. Almost every website silently loads dozens of third-party scripts that track you and burn your CPU and battery doing it, often through fingerprinting designed to be impossible to opt out of. Firefox sits in front of all of that at hundreds of millions of users, which means even small defensive decisions in the browser meaningfully change what's possible for ordinary people on the open web. You can't just block everything (the web breaks), so the browser has to make per-request judgement calls in real time, which turns out to be a surprisingly rich ML and systems problem. I geeked out on it constantly: Tweedie regression on heavy-tailed cost distributions, ONNX inference budgets inside a browser process, low-level C++ work in Gecko, security at a scale that actually matters. The paper I'm submitting to ANRW with Tim Huang is the part I'm most excited about people reading.
The team itself was the best part. Some of the sharpest and kindest engineers I've ever been around, the kind who'd explain something three levels deeper than you asked because the deeper thing was where it got interesting. I learned an enormous amount just by being in the room.
I came in through hackathons and I still love them! I've won a few (UofTHacks, Google's Hack the Future, two at Hack the North), and now I mostly help run them. I help organize UofT Blueprint, where about 55 student engineers ship pro-bono software for nonprofits like Toronto Community Employment Services, agricultural tech work with farmers, and Mozilla itself. I was previously a Claude Builder Ambassador for Anthropic in Canada, running workshops and the Toronto AI hackathon.
Books I've read this month
- Crucial Conversations by Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, and Switzler
- Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke
- Range by David Epstein
I write the odd essay about what I've been reading on my blog.
Ultra running and triathlons
I run, ride, and swim, in roughly that order of competence, and I'm training for the Canadian triathlon team for the 2027 world championships. I'm also very much into ultra running, climbing, and the gym. This year I'm racing two or three 50km ultras and a full Ironman. The training is most of my non-work life and the part of the week I like most.
Other fun facts about me
- I've always loved geography. I have a small collection of maps I find interesting, can draw the world (every country border) freehand more or less correctly, and play a lot of GeoGuessr.
- All of my belongings live in one 40L black duffel. I care a lot about the environment and am strongly against fast fashion.