About Bill

The short version is that there isn't one.

The credentials

SVP of data engineering. Forty years in the technology industry. Started as a media buyer. Taught himself everything else. No CS degree. Philosophy major from UCLA, class of '89.

At UCLA he studied under three people who shaped how he thinks:

• Alonzo Church — the man who proved, in 1936, that some problems have no algorithmic solution. Lambda calculus — the formal system Church invented to define what computation is. The Church-Turing thesis. The foundation of everything a computer can and cannot do. He was in his eighties by then. He could barely see, barely hear, barely stand. His mind was everything.
• Kit Fine — modal logic (reasoning about what's necessary versus what's merely possible) and the metaphysics of possible worlds. Necessity vs. contingency. The question "is this true?" becomes "in which worlds is this true?" — which is the question the memoir asks.
• Philippa Foot — moral philosophy. The trolley problem is hers. Ethics as something you reason about, not something you feel.

He took upper-division logic and aced the exams fastest in the class — using the wrong notation but getting the right answers. His professor made him sit separately on a final to confirm he wasn't cheating. He wasn't. His process is just non-standard. Always has been.

The career

Media buyer. National broadcast supervisor. Pivoted sideways into an internal technology group because the tools were more interesting than the meetings. VP for a decade. Then SVP over data engineering — Snowflake (a cloud data warehouse), identity systems (matching people across datasets), audience platforms (tools that build ad targeting segments), six countries, a team of engineers who are all smarter than him at the thing they're smart at.

The arc makes no sense on paper. Philosophy to media buying to broadcast to engineering to AI. But the thread is the same: figure out the problem, break it down, build the solution, move on. The domain changes. The method doesn't.

The family

Married to Lesley since 1997. Together since 1985, when they were both at UCLA. She is the reason for everything that works.

Two daughters. Zoe, the writer — studying English lit, already better with words than her father. Sadie, the artist — studying psychology, sees everything her father can't see about himself, and draws it.

His father, Gary, died on December 23, 2025. The memoir is Gary's elegy. The Gmail address it ships from was created for Gary. The whole project — the book, this site, the AI workflows, the award submissions — started because Bill sat down after his father died and needed to write something true.

The neurodivergence

His brain transcodes incorrectly but optimizes to the correct result at speed. Wrong notation, right answer. Wrong path, right destination. It looks like chaos from the outside. From the inside it's a compiler with non-standard syntax.

Sadie spotted it years ago. Bill half-acknowledged it. In 2026 he filed the paperwork and made it official. Hidden disability. Not broken — just a different instruction set.

The humor

His primary love language and creative instrument. Forty years of cultural intake compressed into a reflex. If you've read the memoir, you know. If you haven't — the man has a scene called "No Fucking Eye Deer" and another called "What's for Lunch" that will make you laugh and then make you cry, in that order.

Why this site exists

Because he built a 184-page memoir in 20 days using AI as production infrastructure, and people kept asking how. Because the answer isn't "AI is magic." The answer is "I know how to think, and the AI knows how to type." Because the pyramid is inverted — we taught people tools when we should have taught them judgment. Because his father would have thought this was funny.

Because if a philosophy major with no CS degree and a non-standard compiler for a brain can do this, so can you. That's the thesis. That's YOU++.