Hi, I'm Geoffrey. I'm a PhD student in Computer Science at MIT in the Software Design Group. My goal is to make programming radically more accessible, so that everyone can build and tweak their own software.

These days, I'm building Wildcard, a platform that empowers end users to modify web applications through a spreadsheet interface, without doing any programming.

To get occasional updates about my work, follow me on Twitter or subscribe via RSS.

Previously, I was an early engineer at Panorama Education (YC S13), an edtech startup building data analytics software for K-12 schools. I helped grow Panorama into a market leader that serves 10 million students.

Here are some things I've made:

Programming tools

Wildcard

Wildcard

Spreadsheet-driven customization of web applications (CCS 2020)
Json sheets

JSON Sheets

A reactive programming environment for building GUIs
Margin notes

Margin Notes

Automatic code docs w/ recorded examples from runtime (LIVE 2018)
Ladybug

ladybug

A Ruby debugger backend for the Chrome Dev Tools UI
Dynamicland

Experiments in Dynamicland

Exploring in the dynamic medium

Data visualization / NLP

Free response analytics

Panorama Free Response Analytics

Using NLP to help educators understand survey feedback
News context

News context sidebar

Automatically providing background context about news articles
Pedometer

Pedometer data analysis

Analyzing a year of data from my smartphone step counter

Hardware / Electrical Engineering

Quadcopter

Autonomous quadcopter

A sonar-based obstacle avoidance system for a quadcopter
Laser scanner

Laser scanning

An algorithm for efficiently determining object orientation with a cheap laser scanner
Formula hybrid

Bulldogs Racing

Embedded software for a gas-electric hybrid racecar

Other projects

Postgres bson

Postgres BSON

Extending PostgreSQL with faster JSON queries
Classroulette

classroulette

Making online course catalogs skimmable and serendipitous
Patient id

Patient ID

Reimagining digital patient identification at hospitals
Simple recommender

simple_recommender

User recommendations for Rails apps, using Postgres

Conference Talks

Enhance

ENHANCE! (BangBangCon 2017)

Explaining Generative Adversarial Neural Networks using CSI
Ruby family history

Ruby, A Family History (RailsConf 2018)

Exploring how Ruby was influenced by Lisp, Smalltalk, and Perl
Deep learning intro

Deep Learning: an Introduction (BostonRB)

An introduction to deep learning techniques for Ruby developers

Writing

Climate art, hacking Autodesk, and other funemployment projects
Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software
Adding tail call optimization to a Lisp interpreter in Ruby
ENHANCE!: Upscaling images CSI-style with generative adversarial neural networks
No Redis Needed: building a Postgres-backed recommendation engine for Rails
The Virtual Cafe: a better way to hang out remotely
Five Books I Loved in 2015
Gaining faith in the future of government: CfA Summit 2015 recap
Building Waze for the Boston subway: my first adventure in civic hacking
2014: A year in review with iPhone pedometer data
Beyond the SQL/NoSQL debate

Inspirations

Here's a very incomplete list of people whose work I've found inspirational. If your taste is similar to mine, maybe you'll get some inspiration from their work too.

Contact me

Please reach out if you're interested in chatting about ideas, or if I might be able to help you in some way. You can contact me via email or on Twitter.