Hi, my name is Tristam. I’m originally from across the British-American-Caribbean sphere, but these days I’m living in Galicia, in the northwest of Spain.

This is the Colibri, the traditional Puerto Rican sloop I was born aboard (yes, I was born on the boat, with no medical folks in attendance). We lost track of her sometime after the sale, but she was most likely lost in a hurricane in Martha’s Vineyard.

This is the Jolanta, a wooden ice-breaker designed by an aircraft engineer, roomy and dependable, but not designed for speed. We sailed her across the Atlantic ocean before I turned 2, and lived aboard till I was 8 years old. The next owners took her up to Scotland for an extensive refit, and as of 2025 she was moored in Cornwall.

This is the Ushuaia. We bought the bare hull when I was 8 years old, and spent the next few years building her into an ocean-going schooner. Although the hull is fiberglass, everything else is traditional: unstayed wood masts hewn from the New Forest, gaff rig, and no engine - approaching under sail struck fear in the hearts of dockmasters everywhere. I made my second Atlantic crossing on her at the age of 12. Some years after we sold her, she was destroyed in a hurricane in St Thomas.

From the Caribbean, I moved to Boston, in order to attend Suffolk University. I worked out a combined program to get my Masters in CS, Bachelors in CS, plus a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy, all in 5 years. In my last year there I also took over the System Administrator role for the Math and Computer Science department, and I stayed on in that role for a bit after graduation.

Right out of university, I took a job at Amazon’s brand new Digital Products office in Cambridge, MA. The office worked on top secret projects, originally out of a coworking space. My side of the office worked on the 3D user interface stack for the FirePhone, the other side worked on Alexa/Echo - neither side was supposed to know what the other worked on. After the disasterous FirePhone launch, and the subsequent cancellation of the FirePhone 2, I started to look elsewhere.

I transfered out to Seattle to build Amazon’s Internet of Things platform, joining the team acqui-hired with the 2lemetry IoT startup. My immediate team built the frontend load balancing and protocol handling. I helped out with scaling up the system to tens of millions of simultaneously connected devices post-launch, but shortly after I received the prized 5 year yellow badge, I decided to leave Amazon.

I joined the Oculus office in Seattle, shortly after its aquisition by Facebook. I helped build the system software and the mobile companion app that managed the onboarding flows for the Oculus Go headset, and maintained and expanded those systems through Quest 1 and 2.

My manager and I split off to found the Oculus for Business team, building out support for Mobile Device Management platforms, and our own in-house software for configuring and managing large fleets of Oculus headsets. I led engineering efforts for that team until the return-to-office mandate in the pandemic, at which point I quit the company.

After 6 months of COVID lockdowns, I decided I was done with apartment living, and wanted some space to stretch my legs/lungs. I made a plan to move to rural Europe, and took a couple of years off from work, to have time to restore a traditional Galician stone house, which now accomodates four generations of my family.

The last couple of years I’ve been the technical lead for the non-profit Surgical Data Science Collective, building and operating a platform for sharing surgical knowledge. SDSC works closely with surgeons across the world to expand access to surgical training, and applies ML techniques to analyse vast amount of surgical data to unlock fresh insight.

At the same time, I’m developing the long-closed village store into a local community hub. A year into the project, it is operating as a cafe with summer barbeque, regular live music, and seasonal craft fairs. We’re not done yet, with more to come in the next couple of years…