Engineering leader, AI practitioner, and 30-year veteran of building software — from functional programming to L1 blockchains to agentic AI systems. He's been building on the frontier long enough to know what's real and what's noise.
Doug loves teaching. He has a rare talent for taking deeply complex technical subjects — blockchain consensus, functional programming, agentic AI — and making them clear without stripping out what matters. His talks and workshops are known for that quality: you walk away with a working mental model, not just vocabulary.
Doug is the founder of EquiTek Consulting, where he builds automated trading systems in Rust and operates AI agent organizations that run on always-on infrastructure. His AI work spans the full modern stack: agent orchestration platforms, coding harnesses, structured output architectures, semantic search, RAG pipelines, and agentic engineering at scale. He's not reporting on AI from the sidelines — he's running it in production.
Before EquiTek, Doug spent five years at Kadena, rising from Senior Engineer to Director of Engineering. He led the team that launched Kadena's Layer-1 blockchain — taking it from testnet to mainnet on schedule and doubling live network capacity. He designed and built the block explorer, led the wallet product team, built developer tooling, managed all crypto trading activities, and grew the engineering team from 2 to 20+ people.
At Takt/Formation, Doug managed ~20 engineers responsible for the personalized email marketing system deployed at Starbucks. He trained and led a frontend team that built a production Haskell web application generating nine figures of annual revenue lift. He has designed interview processes, interviewed hundreds of candidates, and built engineering cultures from scratch.
Doug co-founded the New York Haskell Users Group and was an original co-author of the Snap web framework. He created the Monad Challenges, an open-source educational resource that has helped hundreds of developers climb one of the steepest learning curves in programming through hands-on discovery rather than abstract theory. His 2001 entry in the International Obfuscated C Code Contest won Best AI, and his AI for the LOAPS game went undefeated using a genetic algorithm — a reminder that he's been thinking about machines that act intelligently for a quarter century.
When he's not running agent organizations he likes to hike, kiteboard, climb rocks, and walk slacklines.
While he was initially skeptical of trusting AI with the complexities of software development, Doug has fully embraced engineering with AI after seeing how much it increased his productivity. He knows what the tools actually do, where they reliably fail, and what patterns separate productive AI use from expensive chaos. This course is the distillation of that experience: the mental model he wishes every executive had before making decisions about AI.