Engineer / Architect / Founder
My contributions to the technium: products, platforms, technical organizations, and the systems, tools, and ideas behind them.
My work spans transaction-heavy platforms, mobile systems, AI assistants, language-learning products, and terminal software. The common thread is technical depth in service of something practical: a product that works, a team that ships, or a system that holds up under real pressure.
A few things that best capture what Duane is building now: products with a point of view, not just code for its own sake.
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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.
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A Lotus 1-2-3–style terminal spreadsheet for the modern era, pairing a keyboard-first workflow with native .xlsx compatibility.
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An AI assistant product and operating environment focused on practical autonomy, reliable workflows, and the radical idea that assistants should be genuinely useful.
Startups, consulting, and product bets — not just places worked, but things built from the inside.
Founder / Consultant · 2019–Present
Consulting and product work spanning payment systems, architecture modernization, AI-agent workflows, and the messy reality of partner-facing technical delivery.
Co-Founder & CEO · 2024–Present
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
Architecture and engineering leadership for cloud services and mobile modernization in the logistics and trucking domain.
A few roles where the scale, complexity, or consequences were too significant to leave trapped in resume bullets.
Vice President of Engineering
Led engineering in the point-of-sale and payments space across device software, backend services, and platform architecture for secure, high-availability transaction systems.
Chief Architect
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.
Older technical writing lives here in the Fun in Space archive. Newer essays and commentary live on Substack.
The original WordPress posts are now preserved here as a browsable archive instead of being left to rot in a legacy platform.
More recent essays and updates live on Substack.
A recent Atlas post on the future of real estate and the product/business ideas orbiting that work.
A post about the reasoning and ambition behind building a brokerage model for the future rather than accepting the current one as fixed.
A few posts that reflect Duane's public voice: builder energy, technical judgment, and the occasional well-earned side-eye.
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.
View on X / TwitterThanks to the folks at @IronCalc for the spreadsheet engine. l123 is the first major project I've written in Rust, and IronCalc is a big reason why. I look forward to collaborating with the IronCalc team on improvements and hopefully an accelerated roadmap.
View on X / TwitterI was interviewed for this article from Timothy Lee (@binarybits) about how AI is changing the software industry. I think it sums up the state of play pretty nicely. Recommend reading when you have a chance.
View on X / TwitterWhy on earth would this be a good idea? An expensive AI model dynamically creating your user interface goes against almost every principle of good software UX design that’s ever been written, and it also seems like it would waste a ridiculous amount of computation.
View on X / Twitter
