Hi, I'm Bill.

I've spent my career getting products out the door: the firmware, the electronics, the cloud and mobile pieces behind them, and the unglamorous work of actually shipping at volume. Along the way I've written firmware that runs on millions of units in the field — with zero firmware recalls.

Lately a lot of that work involves AI. I use these tools hard, every day, on real products. I'm also honest about what they can't do — which, if you've read any of my field notes, is kind of the whole point. An experienced engineer stays in the loop, because that's where the judgment lives.

• Designed and developed the firmware, electronics, and software for dozens of shipped products.
• Wrote firmware running on millions of devices in the field — zero firmware recalls.
• Led engineering teams and acted as architect while keeping my hands on the actual work.
• PhD, MSEE, and a Computer Engineering degree — all earned while working full time.
• Published and presented through IEEE and ACM, peer-reviewed.

Why the research matters

This is the part I'd actually want a skeptical reader to see.

My doctoral work was on whole-program compilers — specifically UnStacked C, a source-to-source transformation that rewrites multithreaded C into stackless continuations to save memory and eliminate a whole class of stack-overflow faults. Put plainly: I spent years getting a machine to rewrite code correctly, under brutal constraints, without introducing bugs.

That's the same muscle the AI conversation needs right now. Knowing when an automatic transformation is safe — and when it's confidently wrong — isn't a guess for me. It's what I studied. It's why I trust these tools for the parts they're good at and keep a human firmly on the parts they aren't.

Selected experience

Thing Done LLC — Owner / Consultant (2019–present)
Bringing software-driven consumer electronics to market. Supplementing existing teams or standing up new ones across the whole product pipeline — leadership, firmware, hardware, cloud, frontend, and production support.

SproutsIO — Director of Technology (2017–2020)
Took a connected indoor-growing system (LED lighting, camera, sensors, connectivity) to market in a startup, fulfilling Kickstarter orders. Shepherded it through UL, NSF, and FCC; built the full-stack cloud (React, Python, MongoDB, AWS, Docker) and shipped the cross-platform mobile app to both app stores. Owned electronics, firmware, mobile, cloud, and manufacturing.

CO-AX Technology — Software Engineering Manager / Embedded Design Engineer (2003–2017)
Thirteen-plus years building embedded products for customers across many industries. Head of software and firmware; architected four generations of IoT systems; took a safety-critical NFC/Bluetooth product through IEC/UL 60730; built a web-based traceability system that tracks millions of parts on the manufacturing floor; and stood up the build automation, version control, and IEEE 829 quality process behind it all.

Academics

Doctorate in Engineering — Cleveland State University, 2011
Dissertation: Simplifying Embedded System Development through Whole-Program Compilers

M.S. Electrical Engineering — Cleveland State University, 2006

B.S. Computer Engineering — Cleveland State University, 2005

Selected publications — Stackless Multi-Threading for Embedded Systems (IEEE Transactions on Computers, 2015), plus work in IEEE DCOSS, ACM SenSys, and ACM HotEmNets. Full list on IEEE and ACM.