Full stack developer with 15+ years building products at startups and in open source — founder of JSON Resume, co-founder of cdnjs. These days I build agentic systems end to end: tool-calling copilots with LLM-as-judge gates, autonomous document pipelines on the Claude Agent SDK, a bitemporal knowledge substrate in Rust with Lean-verified invariants, and neural TTS/ASR for Aboriginal language revitalization. Also trained a GPT from scratch in TypeScript and Vulkan just to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. I ship fast and let user feedback steer.
May 2021 — Aug 2026
Principal-level contract engineering, most recently owning the AI capability of an HR-tech SaaS end to end: the agentic layer of the product — an in-app copilot with tool-calling over live customer data, autonomous document-generation pipelines, and the server-side compute services underneath — while shipping across the full stack (PHP/GraphQL, React, Go gateway, edge services).
Highlights
- Built an in-app AI copilot: multi-provider tool-calling agent (Anthropic + OpenAI via Vercel AI SDK) with data-query and mutation tools, an LLM-as-judge quality gate scoring every response on 8 dimensions, and SSE keep-alive for long agent streams
- Designed an autonomous report pipeline — one model plans the document, Claude Agent SDK runs write it against live data, a second agent pass compiles branded slide decks via a 90+ layout PPTX compiler with chart rasterization and LaTeX PDF output, agents running in a parallel containerized fleet
- Moved heavy analytics server-side (Bun + Hono behind a Go gateway): pure-function ports oracle-verified for numeric parity with the client engine, event-keyed Redis caching, validated at 20k+ entity scale
- AI data enrichment: ingested a ~32-table public occupational dataset, LLM-classified it into customer data structures, and built persona-driven simulation commands generating realistic test data at scale
- Shipped a standalone real-time collaborative app on Cloudflare Workers + Durable Objects — WebSocket presence, optimistic updates with server reconciliation, embedded AI assistant with client-side tool execution
- Hunted down multi-user concurrent-edit data loss with a purpose-built integrity harness: truly-parallel mutation racing, event-chain fork detection, contract tests driving real client reducers against the live API
May 2020 — May 2021
Tokenized is a Bitcoin wallet for issuing, managing and trading digital tokens. I built the frontend, shipped as an Electron app. The hard part: keys never leave the user's machine, so all transaction and contract signing happens locally — which meant getting key management and security right in the UI layer.
Highlights
- React
- Redux
- SCSS
- Product
Mar 2018 — Jan 2020
Blockbid is an Australian crypto currency exchange. I started off on the frontend but eventually became tech lead and worked on every moving piece of the exchange. I really enjoyed working with liquidity providers and connecting their platforms to help us achieve liquid markets.
Highlights
- React, Apollo, Styled Components
- Node.js / Rails
- Docker / Heroku / GCP
- Used Figma for design and UX work
- Optimizing markets with tens of millions of rows using SQL.
Jan 2016 — Jan 2018
Built a large React/Redux application that runs everywhere — web, iOS and Android — as a PWA wrapped in a thin React Native shell. One codebase, every platform.
Highlights
- Worked with Postgres, Redis and Dynamodb for storage.
- Hosted on a mixture of Heroku Apps and EC2 servers.
- Caching by Fastly and Cloudflare
- Hybrid app supported on all platforms
Apr 2014 — Jan 2016
Hired to take EFF's campaigning to the next level by building an action centre in Ruby on Rails. The action centre is built around some large open source tools that lower the barrier to entry when contacting congress.
Highlights
- Developed new tools for contacting congress
- Brainstormed campaign ideas to raise maximum awareness about issues
- Lots of social networking integration
Mar 2013 — Jan 2015
Started off as a front end developer but took on the role of CTO in early 2013. The application frontend is built with Javascript and organized as a single page application that talks to a collection of Rails web servers which are connected to MongoDB.
Highlights
- Managed a small team of developers and designers
- Built the entire frontend application with Backbone.js
- Transferred all of the infrastructure from Heroku to AWS
Jun 2013 — Jan 2016
Worked on many politically charged campaigns against mass surveillance. Not only technically challenging work but also a lot of networking and getting my hands dirty with politics. Our biggest campaign was "The Day We Fight Back."
Highlights
- Generated 37,000,000 banner views
- 100,000 phone calls to congress
- 500,000 emails
- 250,000 signatures
Jan 2011 — Jan 2014
I write tutorials and blog post regarding the popular Javascript framework Backbone.js. The tutorials cover a range of topics regarding front end development aimed at beginners, experts and anyone in between.
Highlights
- Over two million unique visitors a year
- 25,000+ ebook downloads
- 300,000+ Youtube views
Jan 2011 — Jun 2012
Ephox is a worldwide company who is heavily involved with the development of TinyMce and enterprise editors. My primary role included building front-end widgets and applications. Worked on a major product using Backbone.js as a base. Heavily involved in UI/UX design and wire-framing. Also spend a lot of time designing API specifications and documentation.
MobTranslate Jan 2020 — Aug 2026
Open-source language revitalization platform for Aboriginal Australian languages — dictionaries for dozens of languages, community voice recording, and a full speech/ML stack built with the community, not just for it.
Highlights
- Neural TTS pipeline: MMS-TTS (VITS) driven through a grammar-grounded orthography bridge that maps Kuku Yalanji spelling onto a same-family Pama-Nyungan donor voice (per Patz's reference grammar), per-word phonemic IPA for 2,679 dictionary words, deterministic seeded synthesis with full provenance, and a per-language model registry
- ASR for low-resource speech: wav2vec2/Omnilingual CTC fine-tuning pipeline with reproducible dataset builds, serverless training runs, and benchmark harnesses
- LLM translation fine-tunes with research-grade evaluation: lexical censuses, prompt ablations, dose curves, failure taxonomies, and curriculum replay datasets across Kuku Yalanji and Mi'gmaq
- Native Android keyboard (IME), community recording infrastructure where real speaker audio always outranks synthesis, and sentence-corpus pipelines that turn recordings into training manifests
- CARE-aligned governance: synthetic voices are explicitly flagged as scaffolds, donor voices are borrowed until a community licenses its own, and per-speaker (elder) models require explicit, revocable consent
The University of Queensland Feb 2008 — Dec 2009
Defender of the Internet
AI & LLMs
Frontend
Backend
Cloud & DevOps
Architecture & Tooling
Low-Level & GPU
Gardening
- Lazy Gardening
Music
- Guitar
- Singing
- Dancing
Books
- Reading
- Writing
- History
Open Source
- All of it
Thomas was hired as a lead developer and, upon the leaving of our co-founder took over as CTO of Earbits. Thomas is, hands down, one of those A Players you hear of companies dying to hire. He is incredibly smart, not just at code but about everything from classical music to Chinese language and culture. Thomas is great to work with and, as a well established contributor to open source projects and several successful ventures, commands the respect of engineers at all levels. I would suggest doing anything you can to have him on your team.
— Joey Flores, Co-founder and CEO of Earbits, Inc.
I've had the great pleasure of working with Thomas for the past three years at Earbits, and on a few side projects. Two years ago our CTO left on a moment's notice, Thomas saved our company by quickly stepping up to fill this role. He has been with our company through thick and thin and made serious personal sacrifices in order to help the company during tough times. He is a phenomenal hacker and a true team player. Highly recommended!
— Yotam Rosenbaum, SVP of Operations, Earbits, Inc.
Thomas is an extremely talented engineer with a very broad range of skills and experience. From being a thought leader in the front-end community via backbonetutorials.com and cdnjs.com, to designing and implementing the API for cdnjs.com, working with Thomas has been fantastic learning experience. Thomas is truly a full stack develop, and his work output is incredible. If there is any opportunity to work with Thomas, I take it. He is the definition of an A player.
— Ryan Kirkman, Senior Software Engineer at Nerdwallet