Back in the Market
And Thinking About What’s Next in Programming
An unexpected turn has me back in the job market, looking for new opportunities.
It’s certainly a wild time to be job hunting—both for personal reasons (being 50+ among them) and because the tech hiring climate feels pretty uncertain, at least anecdotally, from what I’ve been seeing and hearing over the last year or so.
That said, after nearly 30 years in the web and mobile space, I do feel incredibly fortunate—this is actually my first experience being directly impacted by any sort of layoff, large or small. To be clear, this sucks, but I've always had a bit of a lemons-to-lemonade starting position when life happens.
One thing is for sure: I'll be getting a firsthand look at the reality of the market starting... now.
Rethinking the Job Search
This job hunt is without a doubt going to be a journey. Instead of trying to mold myself to fit specific job descriptions, I'm working on clearly articulating the kind of role that's the right fit for me—and being transparent about that along the way.
One of the trickier parts is that the kinds of roles I'm most interested in are still evolving. Some are only just starting to hybridize in a way where the responsibilities I'm after are beginning to show up in the job descriptions (hint: Generative AI-related).
In thinking about this—and in answering a former colleague who asked what kind of role I’m looking for—I realized two things:
I don’t want to fall into the “what ya got?” mindset that my broad skillset sometimes tempts me into.
I’m mostly focused on roles at organizations that are seriously exploring how Generative AI can be applied impactfully to software engineering, application development, and infrastructure. That’s where I’m most aligned and where I believe I can have the most impact.
Where I’m Coming From, and Where I’d Like to Go
I'm still narrowing things down, but my core skillset is in mobile iOS development, with broader experience across full stack web, cloud platforms (AWS, GCP), and most recently, GenAI.
I’m open to tech lead, solution architecture, or senior IC roles—ideally somewhere I can combine my mobile and GenAI experience and help shape where things are headed in that space.
In my last role at The New York Times (it’s my last week as of the time of this writing), I helped co-organize an internal AI Community of Practice focused on implementation, governance, and knowledge sharing around Generative AI and LLM-backed application development. I was part of a small group exploring how these technologies could reshape software development (think coding assistants) and application architecture at an organizational level. We helped teams explore and evaluate stack components and options for GenAI-backed systems, and the company was actively investing in shared learning to prevent siloing.
It’s important to me to continue this kind of work—whether it’s embedded directly in a role or as part of a collaborative contribution. I want to be part of the conversation about what’s next, and ideally help shape it.
“Why,” you ask?
A New Abstraction Layer: Programming in Natural Language
Software engineering is experiencing a paradigm shift as natural language becomes the newest and most accessible level of abstraction in the long evolution of programming. From early machine code and assembly language to higher-level procedural and object-oriented languages, each leap in abstraction has expanded who can build with code. Now, natural language interfaces are opening the door even wider, lowering the barrier to entry for non-programmers while still requiring experienced engineers at the helm to guide, validate, and shape the systems being created (for the moment...).
This moment marks a profound transition—not just in tools, but in who gets to participate, and how. We’re in the early days of watching programming shift from a domain-specific languages to a more conversational one, and with that comes enormous opportunity, but also a need for stewardship.
This is where I believe I can help.