I build at the intersection of AI, curiosity, and impact.
I spent the last six months in Thailand with family. Staying that long let me learn the culture from the inside, which is the only way it really sticks. I am back in DC now.
The other thing taking up my time is generative AI. I have worked through most of the content stack, Midjourney, ComfyUI, Runway, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, and most of the agentic stack too, mainly Claude Code and Codex, burning through the Max plan token budget more often than I should admit. I have used it to build web and iOS apps, hand off the repetitive parts of my week, and put together workflows that now do work I used to do by hand. I also set up OpenClaw as a personal assistant, and it handles a growing share of the coordination I used to track myself.
Put together, it adds up to a rebuild of how I run daily life. It follows the same loop I use at work: human in the loop at first, human on the loop once the system earns trust, and human off the loop wherever that holds up.
On top of that, I am working through new product ideas and looking for a product management role in a data-intensive environment, where I can work out how AI fits into it.
I started as a software engineer at Lenovo, mostly to learn. I cared about engineering rigor and test driven development, and about the craft side of it too, clean architecture and code that performs.
Then tech lead, which I think of as being the safety net for a team while you build it up. It mixes execution and direction: keeping delivery on track while investing in the engineers who will carry the work forward.
Two years as a technical product owner came after that, and the job shifted from execution to strategy. Deciding what to build, and just as much what not to build, and getting there through influence rather than authority.
I finished with an MBA at Oxford, on the Dean's List, which turned out to be as much reflection as study. The program gave me the business fundamentals, markets, finance, strategy, negotiation, plus some machine learning and predictive analysis. The rest of Oxford mattered just as much: wandering into other disciplines, the college life, and long conversations with some of the sharpest people I have met. The cohort came from dozens of countries, and a year of arguing and building ideas alongside them left me seeing the world far more widely than I had.
I care about a few things deeply. I travel to learn, to pick up perspectives I cannot get from one desk in one city. When I am not travelling I am mostly outdoors, hiking and cycling, and nature is where I feel most at home. I take photographs, usually of quiet rooms and landscapes, and on clear nights I do astrophotography and stargazing. It pulls me out of the day to day and makes me think on a much longer timescale. Some of the photography lives at @mikemeetslens, and the astrophotography at @mikemeetsastro.
Digital painting is the looser version of that, somewhere I can make things with no brief at all. On weekends I read the Buddhist classics, which is where I go to quiet my head. Over time they have made me more grateful, and a good deal more patient with people than I used to be.