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Engineer / Architect / Founder

Duane Moore

My contributions to the technium: products, platforms, technical organizations, and the systems, tools, and ideas behind them.

I’ve spent my career at the frontier where new technology meets consequential real-world systems: early online collaboration and distance learning, fully immersive virtual reality, autonomous vehicles, Air Force command-and-control, large-scale data platforms for space situational awareness, secure payments and point-of-sale, mobile computing, automation systems for long-haul trucking and residential real estate, and AI-native products, including an investment research platform for a hedge fund and a modern language learning app. I’ve worked across the stack: from embedded systems and distributed infrastructure to developer platforms, desktop/web/mobile apps, and product architecture, and across the org chart, as an engineer, architect, executive, and founder. I go deep into technical challenges and solutions, bring clarity to hard problems, and help build systems, teams, and products that hold up when the stakes are real.

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Featured projects

Active

Cantito

A language-learning product built around music, stories, literature, and spaced repetition — meant to feel like contact with a culture, not a pile of flashcards.

Client work · In production

AI-Native Investment Research Platform

Built for an investment team and in production after four months (Jun–Sep 2026): live market data and consensus estimates on thousands of companies, a searchable, cited corpus of 200,000+ documents, a live valuation engine in Rust, and research agents that answer in the web app, in Slack, and inside Claude.

Open Source · v1.4.0

l123

A Lotus 1-2-3–style terminal spreadsheet for the modern era, pairing a keyboard-first workflow with native .xlsx compatibility. New in 1.4.0: IronCalc 0.8.3 and faithful Excel theme colors.

Active

Sancho AI

An AI assistant product and operating environment focused on practical autonomy, reliable workflows, and the radical idea that assistants should be genuinely useful.

Course

A Supercomputing Primer

A primer on the history of supercomputing for modern engineers — tracing the architectures, ideas, and tradeoffs from early vector machines through today's HPC and AI clusters.

Companies and ventures

Startups, consulting, and product bets — not just places worked, but things built from the inside.

Founder / Consultant · 2019–Present

Zarkov Technologies

Consulting and product work spanning payment systems, architecture modernization, AI-native research platforms for investment teams, AI-agent workflows, and the messy reality of partner-facing technical delivery.

Co-Founder & CEO · 2024–Present

Atlas

Product, engineering, and operational leadership across iOS, Android, web, backend, and AI-native workflows in the residential real-estate domain.

Co-Founder & CTO · 2020–2023

Channel19

Architecture and engineering leadership for cloud services and mobile modernization in the logistics and trucking domain.

Career highlights

A few roles where the scale, complexity, or consequences were too significant to leave trapped in resume bullets.

Vice President of Engineering

Clover / First Data

Led engineering in the point-of-sale and payments space across device software, backend services, and platform architecture for secure, high-availability transaction systems.

  • Led large distributed engineering teams of 65+ across multiple regions.
  • Directed software spanning payments devices, backend services, and platform systems.
  • Helped scale platform operations across the U.S., LATAM, and EMEA.

Chief Architect

Intelligent Software Solutions (ISS)

Led architecture for large-scale data and platform systems serving the Defense and Intelligence communities, including work to rebuild the Air Force's major Command and Control system.

  • Led architecture for advanced solutions serving the Defense and Intelligence communities.
  • Helped lead work to rebuild the Air Force's major Command and Control system.
  • Drove implementation alignment across teams and organizational boundaries.

Undergraduate Research Programmer

National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)

Helped pioneer early web-based collaboration, distance education, virtual reality, and information retrieval systems at NCSA.

  • Led development of netWorkPlace and helped lead netLearningPlace, early web-based collaboration and distance-education environments.
  • Helped build one of the first University of Illinois courses to be conducted over the Internet.
  • Created virtual-reality applications in the CAVE environment and researched human-computer interaction techniques for advanced visualization systems.
  • Developed an email archiving system that served as a precursor to NCSA's VIAS information retrieval system.

Writing

Older technical writing lives here in the Fun in Space archive. Newer essays and commentary live on Substack.

Fun in Space archive

The original WordPress posts are now preserved here as a browsable archive instead of being left to rot in a legacy platform.

Browse the full Fun In Space archive

Recent from Substack

More recent essays and updates live on Substack.

Atlas - Dispatches from the future of real estate · 2025-11-11

Is Atlas Shrugging?

A recent Atlas post on the future of real estate and the product/business ideas orbiting that work.

Visit duane1024.substack.com

Selected posts from X / Twitter

A few posts that reflect Duane's public voice: builder energy, technical judgment, and the occasional well-earned side-eye.

It’s the “Brave New World” versus “1984” debate all over again. Big AI Is Watching You (and can kill you) versus everyone takes a little AI soma and is perfectly happy with their lot in the dystopia.

Quoting

Ruxandra Teslo 🧬 @RuxandraTeslo

New essay: my fear regarding AI is rather "mundane" compared to existential risk. The danger seems to me that we might actually prefer to relinquish control to the machines, as human cognitive capacities atrophy and the institutions supposed to cultivate them are hollowed out.

View original post
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I tried markitdown to see if it was markedly better than the existing markdown conversion in my codebase and... nope. Not saying it's useless, but always best to measure these things when possible.

Quoting

Matt Dancho (Business Science) @mdancho84

Microsoft is making moves again. A quiet little Python tool just shot to the top of GitHub’s trending charts. 100,000+ stars. It’s called MarkItDown. And it does something deceptively simple: It turns almost any file into clean Markdown. PDFs. Word docs. PowerPoints. Excel files. Images. Drop a file in. Get structured Markdown out. Sounds small. …

GitHub card for microsoft/markitdown: Python tool for converting files and office documents to Markdown, 111k stars View original post
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"Based on available telemetry, the occurrence rate of this problem in the wild appears to be less than or equal to the expected occurrence rate of SSD malfunctions and/or cosmic-ray hits." That's my new go-to phrase when I close a Jira/Linear issue as "Won't Fix".

Quoting

Phil Eaton @eatonphil

Cited in the SQLite docs. That's pretty cool.

Screenshot of SQLite's Write-Ahead Logging docs, section 11.2 “Low Probability Of Occurrence”, crediting Phil Eaton's reproducer and comparing the bug's rate to SSD malfunctions and cosmic-ray hits View original post
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The devices we already carry around with us will be powerful enough in 5-10 years (probably much sooner) that we won’t need a data center in our kitchen.

Quoting

Scott @scottstts

I predict that in 5-10 years every household will have a local AI server that serves all the AI workload of the house, digital or robotics. It’ll be as common as a WiFi router or a fridge it creates a private mesh network to link all the devices in the house and does inference completely locally, with built in data vault resistant to remote data hacking or physical tampering. That way you can have every single piece of information about you and your family stored in there and never leaves it, and AI can use them to provide most accurate and customized services

A black server rack full of fans and GPUs standing in a home kitchen between the fridge and the dishwasher View original post
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Fiserv (@Fiserv) is investing $100M and scaling up their @CloverPlatform in Brazil. A little behind the scenes on my contributions to making that possible: 🧵

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I’ve been building l123, a Lotus 1-2-3 clone for the modern era: a terminal spreadsheet that recreates the keyboard-driven DOS workflow while speaking modern Excel. Classic interaction model, modern engine, native .xlsx compatibility. Because the / key was never the problem.

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