Maciej Ceglowski <maciej@ceglowski.com>

Personal

I'm a technologist and essayist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Work Experience

• May 2009 - present
  Flounder, Pinboard.in

  Pinboard is a paid bookmarking site and personal web archive that I run as a solo project. Responsible for design, code, operations, hosting, and everything else. In 2017 I acquired my once-famous competitor, del.icio.us.

• June 2007 - October 2009
  Independent Contractor

  Designed and built an internal data warehouse for Twitter.
  Redesigned backend architecture for Aupeo.
  Designed and built a spreading activation geographic recommendations engine for Platial and ad server infrastructure at SixApart.

• January 2007 - June 2007
  Web Developer, Brickhouse, Yahoo!

  First engineer hired at Yahoo's internal startup incubator.
  Worked as a backend developer, community manager and bug squasher on the Pipes visual Web programming environment. Designed and implemented a visual airfare search tool called FareMaps (last seen entering Yahoo Legal).

• April 2005 - January 2007
  Independent Contractor

  Designed and built a JavaScript web application for bookmarking New York City restaurants. Created an iTunes recommendations engine using principal component analysis for France Telecom. With utter lack of shame, co-founded and wrote codebase for Podlinez, a service for listening to podcasts over a regular phone line (sold in December 2006). Built recommendations engine for upcoming.org

• December 2004 - April 2005
  Assistant Program Officer, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

  Worked in the Research in Information Technology program. This was an abortive effort by Mellon to get involved in funding open-source software that could be of use to higher education.

• January 2001 - December 2004
  Lead Developer, National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE)

Built a number of open-source search engines and visualization tools for university use. These included a latent semantic search engine, a set of Perl modules for spreading activation search, a part-of-speech tagger for English, unsupervised clustering tools, and a weblog census.

• June 2000 - January 2001
  Web Programmer, Timberline Interactive

  Built database-driven websites for small retail businesses in Vermont.

Essays

• The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel, a fanciful writeup of burrito delivery in an alternate world.
• Scott and Scurvy, a meditation on why the cure for scurvy was lost in the 19th century.
• Why Not Mars, an argument against near-term human exploration of Mars.
• The Lunacy of Artemis, a critique of NASA's incoherent moon program.

Projects

• Wrong Tomorrow, a site for tracking predictions by pundits and public figures. (site currently down)

• LOAF

  (with Joshua Schachter, Peter Gadjokov)

LOAF used Bloom filters to share social network information through email without exposing private information.  The project was an early attempt at a privacy-preserving decentralized social network.

• The Bedbug Registry

  A free online directory of bedbug reports at hotels and street addresses across North America.

Publications

• Testimony on Privacy Regulation before the Senate Banking Committee, 2019.
• I’m teaching email security to Democratic campaigns. It’s as bad as 2016., Washington Post, 2016.
• Best Food Writing, 2006. "The Unbearable Thinness of Crust"
• Travelers' Tales Best Travel Writing, 2007. "Argentina on Two Steaks A Day"

Education

B.A., Middlebury College, 1997 (double major in Russian and Studio Art). Graduated summa cum laude.