Hi, I'm Dan.

I'm a software engineer building decentralized and distributed systems. Occasionally, I write about various things I'm trying to learn or test my understanding of areas I've worked in. You can dive into my posts if you're curious.

I've spent the past few years working on blockchain systems, starting with Ethereum consensus clients and now, mostly, storage systems. Other obsessions include space, physics, and artificial intelligence. Born and raised in Chicago, I moved to San Francisco to get involved in another early stage startup, prior to more recently moving to New York City. Below are some of the things I've worked on over the years.

Building decentralized storage & AI infrastructure

I've been focused on both growth and engineering at Textile. We build web3 native storage and AI solutions.

We're building an AI and agent decision network called Recall. Think of it as a programmable data layer for decentralized agents to prove, monetize, and exchange knowledge. Fast finality, large scale data (GiBs stored natively onchain/offchain)—all backed by horizontally scalable subnets and configurable consensus. A lot of Rust, Solidity (dealing with FFI-like CBOR encoding/decoding), and SDKs in JS/TS.

Prior to Recall, we built Tableland, which is a decentralized SQLite database that gives you a way to write SQL onchain (smart contracts), materialized by an offchain network of validators. It's now a component of the Recall network.

Fellow at Ethereum Foundation

I spent ~6 months as a Core Developer (funded by the EF) where I contributed to an Ethereum research team's codebase, focused on consensus clients and proof-of-stake called ethereum-consensus, written in Rust. Around the same time, I was building small apps that interacted with onchain mechanisms or external APIs, like reading price data off of CEXs or general prices APIs—albeit, these were extremely rudimentary.

Solutions engineering in IoT logistics

A logistics SaaS startup called FourKites hired me in operations, but I quickly moved into sales engineering. We built a platform for IoT device tracking, providing machine learning predictions through integrations with various hardware vendors and global shipment data aggregation. I joined right after the Series A when we were a small team of ~20. By the time I left, we were around 500 people, Series D, and some acquisitions of adjacent tech that was integrated into our platform.

Systems engineering at UIUC

I graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a B.S. in Systems Engineering and (nearly) a minor in Electrical Engineering. I didn't study computer science (aside from an intro to C course), but over the years, I've taught myself the fundamentals through self-study and working on side projects.