About

I’m Cagney. I like building things, measuring things, and getting excited about new possibilities.

I grew up in the trades and went on to run my own contracting business in Southern California for nine years: office build-outs, retail stores, industrial spaces, clean rooms. Construction taught me to estimate, to deal with people under deadlines, and that people want things that “just work”.

Somewhere along the way I got curious about the machines. I taught myself to program, and one project kept leading to the next: a CNC machine built from aluminum plate, 3D printers, cast aluminum parts, PCB milling, an electric skateboard, a balancing robot, a robotic arm with its own motor controllers, video streaming and computer vision, machine learning experiments, and a handful of Android apps, one of which reached close to 100,000 downloads.

For the last few years I worked on firmware for traffic signal equipment, including traffic cabinets and vehicle detectors. I measured timings down to the microsecond, wrote drivers, and learned how products move from idea to release. I also learned how different teams work, and how each person’s path shapes the way they think and what they’re good at.

Lately I’ve been focused on improving how I work and on understanding systems, both the technical kind and the people kind: how they fit together, where they break, and how to make them better. I lean into new tools as they arrive, especially AI, and I write here when I learn something worth passing on.

When I’m not at a desk or a workbench, you’ll find me on a bike, outdoors somewhere, or in the garden. I like growing food, cooking from scratch, and always having a project, book or new idea in the works.

Contact: cagneyamoreau@gmail.com · GitHub