About Duncan

For most of my career I’ve moved between technology, writing, photography, and the occasional attempt to make sense of what comes next. I got pulled into the early web in the mid-1990s while in architecture school, left school before I graduated in order to keep building websites, and never quite made it back to finish my degree.

At Sun Microsystems, I worked on Java web technologies and created Apache Tomcat and Apache Ant. Since then I’ve worked with and for companies including Apple, O’Reilly Media, Wunderlist, Microsoft, and Shopify. At Shopify, I was Technical Advisor to the CEO and Vice President of Developer Productivity, working across technical strategy, developer tools, compensation systems, and the company’s adoption of AI-assisted software development.

I’m currently Senior Vice President of Platform Engineering at Webflow, where I oversee the developer productivity, infrastructure, and reliability organizations. My work is focused on helping engineering teams across the company build and ship products that help businesses create and manage online marketing websites.

I’ve authored or co-authored several books about software, mostly around Mac OS X and Cocoa, and contributed to a few others. Like most technical books, they are now horribly out of date and belong to history, but I’m still proud that they helped people build things while they were useful.

Photography has been the other long-running thread in my life. I’ve had a camera of one kind or another since I was a kid. I photographed conferences professionally for years, including TED from 2009 to 2016 and O’Reilly events before that, along with work for Apple, GigaOm, Salesforce, and others. These days, I make photographs mostly for myself.

This site is the canonical home for my current writing, projects, notes, experiments, and context. Right now I’m especially interested in AI as a way to help people do more ambitious, creative, and humane work. The future I want is not one where machines simply replace people; it is one where better tools make people more capable.

If there’s one phrase from older versions of this site that still fits, it’s that I’m a professional amateur. I like work done with skill, seriousness, curiosity, and love. I don’t plan to stop adapting so I can keep working on things that feel important, satisfying, and fun with people I care about.