I have always had a twinned love of the technical and aesthetic, and in my teens and twenties that fascination took me through a period focused on design, theater, architecture, and technology, and now in my fifties I focus on technology and leadership, through Macktez and numerous non-profit and Coop/Condo boards. Here's what has my attention right now.

Solving the real problem, not the technical one

I co-founded Macktez in the mid-1990s, a technology consulting firm that helps non-profits, startups, and creative companies navigate periods of great change. I believe technology is only half the equation. The other half is listening, learning, and understanding what people actually need. I'm still CEO, and a big part of our work is serving cultural institutions and innovative, creative companies. My focus these days is on what's coming next, a little less on what's come before. A lot of that is understanding automation and AI.

After enough years in this work, I keep seeing the same pattern: too many IT teams focus on what a technology can do instead of what people actually would benefit from. A client calls and says they need a new system. What they usually mean is that their teams can't talk to each other, data is getting lost in the handoff, and nobody knows who owns what. So at Macktez we listen first. Not to the technical spec, but to the frustration and the workarounds people have built. Then we design the system. Some of our experiments are written up as case studies:

Tête-à-Tech Event Series

I host Tête-à-Tech, our in-person interview series, and we’re planning out the 2027 series. We do have a couple of great events left in 2026, so if you're in New York, come check one out.

If you're between jobs, a student, or money is tight for any reason, reach out and I'll send you a code to come for free.

Cultural institutions I'm invested in

I serve as board president of UnionDocs, a center for documentary art in Queens. We're within a few months of reopening the residency on the upstairs floors, and we're slowly growing the board. In-person programming is back in a big way, with tons of exciting events in the last few months. If you last checked while the building was earlier in its construction journey, take another look now.

I'm also a board member of The Victorian Web Foundation, which supports the longest-running website on Victorian arts and culture, pre-dating the web itself (1988!) with hundreds of thousands of pages. It's Victorian and academic, so it moves slowly, but a lot is happening under the hood. In the last year board member Matthew Pontefract moved our back end to GitHub for version control, and CloudFlare for edge caching and analytics. We're close to rolling out a new logo by Paul Glover and an elegant and clever responsive CSS stylesheet design by Mike Stamm.

These organizations may look different on the surface, but they share an essential cultivation of thoughtful, informed discussion about the things that matter most.

On the lighter side: lighting, craft, and aesthetics

I've been playfully experimenting with the timeless kit of parts that is the Vitsoe 606 shelving system, and after being unable to find an existing commercial product that did what I wanted, put together a detailed how to post on hidden elegant lighting. These efforts connect to a longer love of handwork, craft, and materiality that has been expressed through interior design, martial arts, photography, and silversmithing.

I also post pretty regularly on Tumblr, where I've been just “noah” for twenty years (check out the archives), posting little weird stuff: snippets, odds and ends, things too disjointed for this site. It's eclectic, but you might find something interesting.

Almost 20 years ago, I ran a jewelry company, Ligament, for ten years. I recently used Claude Code to do a light touch update, bringing the ancient HTML into the modern era, making it responsive, removing dead links, but preserving the late 2000’s copy; exactly the kind of oddball tedious project one procrastinates on doing for years until recent improvements in tools make it viable to take on.

Want to talk to me about any of this? Find me at Macktez or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Last updated October 2026.