Toolsmiths have created thousands of powerful and useful software development tools, yet software developers only use a small subset of the available tools, and those that a developer does use are often not fully leveraged. I believe that the solution to this problem can be found by rethinking the design of software development tools, based on a better understanding of why developers use and do not use these tools.

I am currently a visiting research scientist at Google, and an associate professor at North Carolina State University, where I direct the Developer Liberation Front. My research spans human-computer interaction and software engineering, winning an NSF CAREER Award in 2013 and three ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards. My research problems are informed by and my results influence software development at companies such as ABB, Google, and Microsoft.