Hi, I’m Benji.
I was born in 1977 in Clearwater, Florida. I’m married to the remarkable musician and restaurateur, Emily Lau. We live in Portland, Oregon.
I’ve been building software for over twenty years - computational linguistics, distributed systems, cloud cost analytics, and delightful user experiences.
In 2012, Emily and I survived the shipwreck of the Costa Concordia. After months of PTSD therapy, we turned the experience into art: I wrote a book (Abandoned Ship) and Emily released an album of original compositions (Isle of Lucidity).
That led me to create Shaxpir, a writing platform for fiction authors. I ran it for eleven years, building everything from the realtime sync infrastructure to novel linguistic analysis algorithms. In February 2026, I announced the shutdown.
With that behind me, now I’m writing about AI, story structure, and human-machine creative collaboration in my column, Machine Creativity. I’m also looking to join a team of dreamers and doers who love building remarkable doodads as much as I do!