A home for the things I make

I’m David Ellis, a software engineer and maker in San Antonio, Texas. Building software to solve practical problems is my craft. Conquer the Lawn is a place to collect that work, write about it, and give the projects a little more context than a repository listing can.

A career of building

Over 20 years of professional software development, I’ve worked across backend, frontend, and infrastructure. The problems have ranged from connecting networks across data centers to scaling event ingestion, reviewing application privileges, and making deployments easier for other engineers.

The common thread is practical work: understand the domain, make the model clear, and build something that helps.

My resume has the full work history. This site gives the side projects a home of their own.

Following a question

Personal projects are how I explore new tools, techniques, and ideas. Sometimes the result is a useful library. Sometimes it is a much deeper investigation.

Able explores the design and implementation of a programming language. Arborist takes a closer look at parsing. simstring is an implementation of an approximate string matching algorithm in Ruby.

Other projects follow questions about market data, statistical models, and backtesting. Different subjects, but the same habit of learning by making something concrete.

Engineering with agents

More recently, I’ve been incorporating LLMs and agent-assisted development into my engineering process. They let me focus more attention on the vision for a product and the design constraints it needs to satisfy.

The principles still matter: clear domain models, well-defined semantics, testing that checks the important behavior, and systems that stay operationally simple.

What belongs here

The project directory collects the tools and experiments. These field notes are a place for the thinking around them: useful discoveries, design decisions, and the things learned along the way.

Welcome to Conquer the Lawn.