Building for how people learn.
I've shipped software for eighteen years, most recently as CTO of an ed-tech startup. Now I build apps that help people learn.
me, College Station, Texas
Now
I am building an app that helps people learn about art and enjoy it. It starts with paintings that museums around the world have released under CC0, so anyone can use them. An LLM is the tutor.
In 1984, Benjamin Bloom found that students with a one-to-one tutor score two standard deviations higher than students in a class. Schools cannot pay for one tutor for each student. An LLM can be a tutor at a low cost. I want to know if an LLM can teach art.
Work
| 2025–26 | Master Ed. CTO and co-founder. Voice roleplay for training. We ran pilots with two universities and one company. |
| 2022–24 | Tamedia. Zürich. I took over a codebase that was falling apart and a team people kept quitting. Two years later nobody had quit and the team was twice the size. |
| 2019–22 | EPFL. Blue Brain Project. Front end for the knowledge graph. |
| 2017–19 | Amazon. Front end, React. |
| 2013–17 | Front Rush. Sports recruiting software, .NET and Rails. |
| 2008–11 | TCS. .NET apps for banks. |
Follow
Build notes go on LinkedIn. Shorter, daily stuff on X, @dneelamana. Longer essays on Substack. Code on GitHub.