Writing
Some of my writing used to be on Medium. I've moved the more popular posts here:
- Cretaceous Software Engineering (2025)
- I’m an Old Fart and AI Makes Me Sad (2024) [Discuss]
- I Almost Burned Out as a Software Engineer, so You Don’t Have To (2023)
- Being a Solo Software Entrepreneur at 40 (2022) [Discuss]
Digital Art
Occasionally I get to work in a field that is quite different from the one I’m used to. Here’s some recent work that I’ve done and which I’m proud of.
Denominator by Urs Fischer
Denominator is a large, cube-shaped video installation with contemporary advertisements composed and animated in interesting ways. Exhibited at Gagosian NYC, September 2022
© Urs Fischer, Photo: Tom Powel Imaging
What I built:
- Web-based media curation workflow, multiple terabytes of images and videos
- Web frontend and backend for video curation
- Media storage, processing, conversion using AWS services like Lambda, Batch, AppRunner
- Custom media categorization and labeling using AWS Rekognition and Google Video Intelligence
- Semantic search in a large corpus of videos, powered by OpenAI CLIP model and pgvector for vector embeddings
- AWS account management, solution architecture, implementation and CI/CD deployment
Check out the installation video to get an idea of the artwork.
People by Urs Fischer
People is a projection of physically animated talking heads over a reproduction of a room in the National Gallery, including its artworks. Exhibited at Gagosian NYC, September 2022 as part of Denominator.
© Urs Fischer, Photo: Tom Powel Imaging
What I built:
- Direct collaboration with artist
- Web-based media curation / background removal workflow
- Face detection and measuring for sprite generation using AWS Rekognition
- Physically-based simulation implemented with Python and Box2D
- Custom rendering to ProRes 4444, sprites rendered as video textures
- AWS account management, solution architecture, implementation and CI/CD deployment
Check out the installation video.