For the first ~9 months, I worked on a mix of engineering, design, and product problems to stand up the first version of the product, which allowed our developers and users to build agents, review conversations, and report issues. I also worked on one of our first agents. I helped build the product from a few design partners to many paying customers (we've publicly shared reaching $100M in ARR in Nov 2025).

Since then, I have focused on our Insights features. Among other things, I:

• Worked with some truly excellent data platform engineers to migrate reports and other in-product features to use Clickhouse. We optimized the schema and query patterns to keep these features fast for even our largest customers (millions of conversations per month).

• Improved, then ultimately deleted, various caching systems as a stop-gap before Clickhouse shipped.

• Built SierraQL, a Clickhouse-inspired portable query language for customer conversations, providing a portable way to query conversations across our reporting and internal MCP tooling.

• Improved our Monitors feature, which continually evaluates the performance of our agents. Customers can track the quality of their agents with built-in and custom monitors.

• Helped ship our Agent Observability feature, which is a combination of business and operational alerting on top of our in-product agent analytics.

I spent some time in the mountains, backpacking sections of the Pacific Crest Trail and the Sierra High Route.

I also explored a few different software product ideas that I've had over the years. The two I worked on the most are Composer (https://vbud.dev/blog/composer) and Cairn (I haven't written about this yet).

I also worked through a series of difficult knee problems (ACL tear + cartilage damage from surgical error, 4 surgeries in total), requiring lots of consultations with various expert surgeons and physical therapists. Ultimately, I had to pursue cartilage restoration surgery in Sep 2023, and I'm still working through rehabbing this complex situation.

For ~9 months, I helped Anrok (https://anrok.com/) with design, product, and engineering for the first version of their product.

For 3 months I contracted at Metronome.

I built a capable design team from scratch given my experience working on observability products at New Relic. Designing for observability is hard, so I worked closely with the heads of product and engineering to change how we worked so that design could better participate in our various projects, and I worked with recruiting to identify profiles of designers that would be effective working on a technical product like Lightstep.

I also started Lightstep's UI component library and design system, in collaboration with a designer on my team.

Completed an initiative to migrate Remix's Transit UI from Leaflet to MapboxGL. Remix is a complex drawing tool built on top of a map, so performance was a large focus. I optimized both React and MapboxGL performance as part of this effort.

I also worked on two new features for Remix's Transit planning product: 1) search 2) v2 of Remix's Jane isochrone.