I am currently a full-stack developer at Duke University working mainly on Scholars@Duke. This work spans a wide range of languages and technologies, including Phoenix, Elixir, Ruby, Rails, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Python, Kotlin, Golang, GraphQL, Solr, Postgres, Oracle, OKD, NATS, Splunk, Grafana, and more. I and was previously a TA for Artificial Intelligence at the University of Pennylvania (which was 90% an *algorithms* class and 10% an *LLMs* class), during which time I developed Wampa World, a homework assignment on logical inference for knowledge-based agents, Poodle, a scheduling app for people who receive round-the-clock care, and Unimax, a chess engine art piece that envisions a world where cooperative algorithms supersede adversarial ones.

I am a guitarist and songwriter, currently releasing instrumental guiar under the name J.W. Ricci. I also currently accompany Emma Geiger. I previously made music under the band name Anima & Ennui, and accompanied Talitha Ferri, and Donovan Ryan on guitar.

I also work part time at Red Tail Grains Farm & Mill & Bakery, and have previously worked as a bicycle courier, caregiver, project manager at a record label, bartender, barista, waiter, and AV tech. He loves baking dark rye bread in his toaster oven and pizza in his wood-fired oven. I am a novice and aspiring gardener, hiker and ultrarunner.

I own a handful of domain names that I purchased (or, more accurately, rent) through Squarespace and Porkbun. I would like to one day explore if there are smaller domain registrars outside of the typical corporate structure. My domain names are on the .com, .tools, and .run top level domains, and I hope to one explore ethical considerations around choice of top level domain more deeply. For example, maybe registration on the .is domain has a lower carbon footprint due to the energy mix of Iceland, where the .is domain's registry office is located. All of my website frontends are hosted on GitHub pages, and I hope to move them to a non-corporate repository/host like Codeberg. My most frequent additions to my website are for adding recordings, track listings, and Tidal playlist of my weekly radio show on WXDU. I use joe @ my domain name for email, set up through Proton. I like Proton's encryption, their stated big-tech skepticism, and their record of donating to liberal organizations, though I am suspicious of their support of their reported support of far right video creators and their CEO's statements praising Trump's policies in 2025 (days after I purchased a two year subscription). I hope to explore more grassroots email providers in the future. I still have a handful of gmail accounts that I rarely log into, but that forward to my proton account. I have a Visible (owned by Verizon) subscription for cell service and unlimited data, which I chose because it was the cheapest option I could find in the US. Prior to that I had a Greenspeak subscription while living in Denmark. Greenspeak was half (if not less) of the price of all other services in Denmark. It is an independent business that donates proceeds to charity of your choice and that openly trains people interested in learning programming. I hope to find and switch to another service like that in the US. I do not have ethernet or wifi at home, and I access the internet on my computer via a mobile hotspot from my cell phone. This is good enough for 99% of what I need to do online, and when I need to send or download large amounts of data, I go to a local community center, co-working space, library, or cafe. In general, I prefer technology that I use to be off and not consuming energy when I am not using it. My previous rental came with a wifi router and internet included in the rent. I set up Pi-hole on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W to block traffic from trackers and advertisers. I use an iPhone SE. When it is obscolesced, I hope to switch to a smartphone with a linux-based OS, or a "dumbphone" with mobile hotspot capabilities. For browsing, I mainly use Firefox with uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger extensions on my laptop, and Brave on my phone. I occasionally use Chrome or Safari if I'm having a problem in another browser. I have tried used Librewolf, Orion and Min, and often think I should really switch to using Vivaldi, for many reasons. I have Instagram and Facebook accounts that I rarely post on, and semi-regularly check-in, since I do like seeing what my friends are up to, although I am strongly opposed to them for more reasons than I should include here, but front-and-center seating of certain CEOs behind a certain president of the USA's inauguration made it clear that seeking alternative technologies is one of the most politically important actions we can take at this point in time. I truly mourn the fact that my friends seem to be utilizing Instagram ever more centrally as a facet of social life since this event. I deleted my Twitter account, since none of my friends really use Twitter, but re-created a blank account for being able to read posts that search results direct me to. I am most interested in and ethically aligned with the Fediverse, and have an account on mastodon.green, an instance hosted in Germany, certified running on 100% renewable energy, and that donates 20% of my monthly $2 membership fee towards reforestation. I don't like that mastodon.green uses AWS as its file storage provider, and may port my mastodon account to another instance at some point. I also have an account of pixelfed.social, which I post my analog photography to, and which I embed in my website to display my analog photography, so as to keep my website's data footprint small. I recognize that this is kind of unethically passing the buck for the cost of image storage to pixelfed.social, but I hope that by posting on Pixelfed instead of Instagram, more people will engage with the fediverse and begin to recognize the immensely political, subversive, anarchist, and anti-capitalist potential of decentralized social media. For search, I use a mix of Google, DuckDuckGo, No AI DuckDuckGo, and Metager, which is really a search aggregator that currently mainly pulls from Brave search. I have heard good things about Kagi and may one day switch to a paid, private, ad-free search engine. I like that Metager is a nonprofit and is running on 100% renewable energy, but I am afraid to say that through years of unquestioned technology usage, I have been Google UI-pilled, and I often find myself searching there, with AI summaries and search personalization disabled. I do appreciate how Google has championed digital accessibility research and design, but I don't appreciate their tracking, advertising, and recent obfuscation of the web through AI summaries. For audio, I had been a Spotify user since 2013, but cancelled my subscription in 2025 and ported my data to Tidal, where I have a subscription now. I like that Tidal has the highest purported streaming payouts, but am not confident about the ethics of giving my money to its parent company, Block. I guess the one last sliver of hope I still have for big tech CEOs goes out to Jack Dorsey, who, despite being way too into bitcoin, has at least expressed prudent criticism of publicly traded companies, and has donated towards reforestation, antiracism, UBI, and public education. I also buy music digitally on Nina Protocol (RIP), Bandcamp, when not available on Nina, and Apple Music, when not available on either Bandcamp or Nina. I don't like that Nina Protocol allows unlimited free streaming, but am interested in participating in alternative music platforms. I have published my own music on those platforms and a host of other interesting alternatives including Subvert, Mirlo, Bandwagon and Ratio.FM. For audio-books, I use Libby, which is free through the local library system, and LibroFM for DRM-free audiobooks. I have had two ***big USA-based bank*** accounts since I was a child, and this is where most of my financial activity takes place, although in 2025 I cancelled my **big USA-based bank** savings account and opened a high yield savings account with a **small local savings bank**, and am currently transferring 15% of my monthly paycheck to that account each month. I have investments in a renewable energy index fund and high yield savings. I have applied multiple times and been denied from opening an account at Walden Mutual Bank (because I don't live in the area it serves). I hope to one day be able to move all my money into a bank that transparently supports local community, food and agriculture, and that guarantees that it does not opaquely reinvest or loan your money. I did go through a phase when GPT 4.0 came out of being interested in using LLMs for many things, but generally do not use LLMs for anything anymore except programming advice. I will sometimes use it for navigating bureaucracy, or for troubleshooting potentially expensive repairs that I might be able to DIY, like for car issues. In these cases, I run Ollama on my Macbook, using fully open models from the Allen AI non-profit. I absolutely love that models from the Allen lab are fully open, including open data, which means that we know for a fact that it wasn't trained on copyrighted material. I do find that these local models are as powerful as I ever need -- I rarely see a need for sending a query to a flagship big LLM running at a datacenter, with opaque and undeniably enormous energy usage. I believe that the interpersonal communication and community is invaluable and irreplaceable and that the project of humanity is to establish mutual understanding in all of life -- technical projects not excluded.