Hi, I’m John!

• I’m currently the CTO at Assembled, a company focused on transforming and elevating customer support.
• I was previously the Co-founder and Chief Engineer at Zinc.
• Before that, I was a Software Engineer at Stripe where I was employee 100(ish).
• I studied Computer Science at MIT.
• If you’re looking for more background on me, I wrote a blog post about my startup journey.

Here are some things I’m interested in:

Ruby on Rails

For a few years, I was an active contributor to the Ruby on Rails web framework and made 85 commits, primarily to ActiveRecord, Railties, and some initialization methods.

I also worked on a Google Summer of Code project with Rails Core Team member Santiago Pastorino. We worked on improving the configuration and initialization of Rails applications, and specifically, on the ability to remove the singleton pattern to enable starting up multiple Rails instances at once.

Economics

I spent many of my early years learning about and doing research in economics. I worked under Emily Oster (now a Professor at Brown) and Kerwin Charles (now the Dean of the Yale School of Management) to study the Black-White achievement gap.

I also assisted with Robert J. Gordon’s book “The Rise and Fall of American Growth”. I focused my research on the quality of American housing between 1870 and 1930.

In college, I was a research assistant for David Autor for his paper studying the removal of rent control in Cambridge, MA in 1995.

Most of my economics papers are kept under the Work & writings section of this website.

Applied Math

At MIT, I conducted research in fluid dynamics and disease modeling under Lydia Bourouiba and Tristan Gilet. We studied the dispersal of pathogens on plants using experimental methods (high speed cameras) and mathematical modeling (interfacial flow equations).

Woodworking

I love building things, especially out of wood. Check out my Woodworking page for things that I’ve built.