DAVID ELLIS · SOFTWARE ENGINEER & MAKER

I’m a maker.
Software is
my craft.

I build software to solve practical problems. This is my corner of the internet for the things I make, the ideas I explore, and what I learn along the way.

Explore my projects A little about my work

Based in San Antonio, Texas · Building since 2006

ON THE WORKBENCH↙ A FEW OF MY CURIOSITIES

AbleA programming language from the ground up.

LANGUAGESSYSTEMSALGORITHMS

TWO DECADES OF BUILDING
From infrastructure to the interface.

Loop Returns
shopify
PagerDuty
rackspace

01 / THE WORK

Curiosity, put to work.

All 8 projects

01Languages & parsers

Able

An experimental programming language that brings ideas from Ruby, Scala, F#, and Go into a language of its own.

Go
TypeScript
Tree-sitter

02Languages & parsers

Arborist

A PEG parser combinator in Crystal, with support for left and right recursion and a command-line parser.

Crystal
Parsing
PEG

03Data & algorithms

simstring

Approximate string matching in Ruby. Find the near-matches that an exact lookup would miss.

Ruby
Search
Algorithms

A LITTLE ABOUT ME

Practical problems.
Thoughtful engineering.

I’ve spent 20 years working across backend, frontend, and infrastructure. I care about clear domain models, maintainable systems, and getting useful things into people’s hands.

Outside of work, I build programming languages, experiment with algorithms, and explore what agent-assisted engineering makes possible.

The longer version

02 / FIELD NOTES

Things worth writing down.

Visit the blog

October 28, 20262 min read

Field notes / Making

A home for the things I make

An introduction to this corner of the internet: software, side projects, and the ideas that make me want to build.

I’m a maker.Software ismy craft.