Hi there! I’m Cass, and I’ve been building ML and language systems for the better part of 15 years.

Right now, I work as a Staff Software Engineer at Textio, where I spend my days figuring out how to make AI actually useful for people’s writing. Think of it like this: instead of just telling you that your job posting might have bias issues, we help you write better, more inclusive language from the start. It’s been fascinating work, especially as LLMs have transformed what’s possible.

What I Actually Do

I’ll be honest - my day-to-day looks pretty different than it did even a few years ago. These days, I’m mostly:

  • Building NLP systems that can process language in real-time (we’re talking millions of documents)
  • Training and optimizing models on AWS SageMaker, often running on specialized chips like Inferentia to keep costs reasonable
  • Working with LLMs from OpenAI and Azure to incorporate more sophisticated language understanding into our products
  • Leading projects from “hey, what if we could detect age bias in language?” all the way to shipping features that customers actually use

Before Textio, I spent five years at Mailchimp building their data science team and helping them understand their users better. And before that? I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali and Guyana, which taught me more about cross-cultural communication than any programming course ever could.

Why I Write

I write here because I keep running into problems that seem impossible at first, then turn out to be much more manageable once you understand the core concepts. Whether it’s getting Guix to work for reproducible environments (spoiler: it’s actually pretty great), or thinking through how LLMs might learn relationships the way humans do, I find that writing helps me think through complex ideas.

If you’re someone who works with language, data, or AI systems, you’ll probably find something useful here. I try to skip the fluff and get straight to what actually works - and what doesn’t.

Getting in Touch

I’m always up for chatting about machine learning, language systems, or really any interesting technical problems you’re working on. You can find me on Mastodon, GitHub, or just email me directly.

I’ve got a Master’s in Mathematics from University of Florida, but honestly, most of what I use day-to-day I learned by building things and making mistakes along the way.