I am a software engineer with a Computer Science Ph.D. and 11+ years in industry, largely in healthcare technology but most recently in finance, working on BNY's digital-assets platform. My dissertation was on experimental user interfaces for math and programming. I built them in Java, which led to backend work, but the goal behind that research — making hard things easy — carried over into an interest in developer experience: alongside Spring Boot microservices, I build tooling that removes bottlenecks and helps keep deployments uneventful.
The same instinct drives my side project, KiDraw (kidraw.net), a keyboard-first diagram editor that has become a proving ground for how far AI-assisted development can be pushed, particularly for rapid prototyping. At the other end of that spectrum, at BNY I use coding agents to understand and safely update a codebase spread over a dozen repositories, the largest more than half a million lines of code. The challenge is making sure the agents have the context they need rather than quietly assuming it, then iterating on review, testing, and the problem statement itself until we know we've solved the problem, not just a problem. In some ways programming is becoming easier, but the bar for software quality is rising.
Berman, B. A. and Hourcade, J. P (2014). Keyboard Card Menus: A New Presentation of Non-Standard Shortcuts. Journal of Universal Computer Science, Special Issue on Trending Breakthroughs in Human-Computer Interaction.
Berman, B. A. and Hourcade, J. P (2014). Keyboard Card Menus: Faster Learning of Many Fast Commands. In Proceedings of the XIV International Congress of Human-Computer Interaction (Interaction 2013), in the Spanish Congress of Informatics (CEDI), pages 105-112, Spain, 2013. ISBN 978-84-695-8352-4.
New Coq User Interfaces: Survey and Ideas. Presentation co-authored with Aaron Stump and Juan Pablo Hourcade. Presented at The Coq Workshop 2012, Princeton, NJ, USA, August 12, 2012.