Daniel Wymark's Home Page

Welcome to my home page. I am a father, a husband, an only child with parents I care deeply for; a software developer with about a decade of experience; and I am someone who has broad interests that centered on language, computing, pure mathematics, complex systems, experimental visual design, and the intersection of these topics. Another way to look at my recurring interests: I am drawn to looking for structure in places where one would not naturally expect it. My undergraduate degree was in Linguistics with a minor in Mathematics at UCLA, class of 2017.

I work at Celestron, the world's leading manufacturer of consumer astronomical equipment. It's an opportunity I am grateful for on a daily basis. The company cares about its employees in a way which is rare in our culture today, and I enjoy the nature of the work. I wear many hats on a small engineering team. My day-to-day work is primarily centered on embedded C++ software engineering, but I also work on a wide range of projects in a variety of languages. I work closely with developers who are newer to the team. Code review and some project management adjacent work is also a big part of my role.

I have a large and diverse collection of side projects, very few of which were completed in their entirety. My natural tendency is to get deep into something very quickly, then lose interest and move on after some number of weeks or months. I've been this way for long enough that I have decided to stop considering it a flaw. One of my goals with this website is to start to open up my collection to the public.

On "Artificial Intelligence"

Oh, AI. As with most jargon, the term is misleading at best. Nevertheless, we have to live with it. It includes a hell of a lot more than LLMs, and it has rightfully become culturally maligned these days thanks to the disposition of the leading labs and the impact they are having on everyday people. I don't deny those wrongs.

That said, I'm an LLM enthusiast. Many of my experiments and side projects since 2022 have been authored in part with tooling that relies on LLMs. However: as a matter of principle, I care deeply about distinguishing my own voice from generated text. If I have not marked text as AI-generated, I wrote it by hand without any AI assistance. That includes this document here. Any of the documents I share which were either written wholesale by an LLM, or which are written "in collaboration" with an LLM, will be marked as such unambiguously.

Projects