michaeld123

agreed. it's often in my toolbox -- mostly since I already know it, and I prefer semi-colon-driven syntax -- but it's just one of a few languages I use.

  Location: Takoma Park, MD, USA
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Python, JavaScript, Swift, semantic systems, LLM orchestration
  Site/Portfolio: https://www.michaeldouma.com
  Email: m5@inotherwords-studio.com

Product and design for complex technical systems. Founded an indie game studio — semantic word games, meanings not spelling. Prior: SpicyNodes (visualization, 40M users), time.gov (1999), a medical AI serving 1.5M patients before AI was cool. Judge for IGF, MagFest, CODiE, GEE, Serious Games.

Looking for: technical products that work but need to engage more, feel less like enterprise Java circa 2003. Game design discipline applied to onboarding, repeated use, cognitive load. Series A–C, 10–50 people. Developer tools, learning platforms, data products.

  Latest: https://www.inotherwords.app
  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeldouma/

  Location: Takoma Park, MD, USA
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Python, JavaScript, Swift, semantic systems, LLM orchestration, AI-assisted architecture
  Site/Portfolio: https://www.michaeldouma.com
  Email: m5@inotherwords-studio.com

I fix technical products that work but don't engage.

You built something powerful. Early adopters get it. But broader adoption stalls because the experience doesn't create its own momentum. I specialize in that exact inflection point - making sophisticated tools feel like discovery rather than homework.

My approach comes from 10 years running an indie game studio. I apply behavioral psychology to B2B/developer tools. Not gamification - actual intrinsic motivation that makes the 100th use rewarding. Judge for IGF, MagFest, CODiE, GEE, Serious Games awards.

Recent work: Semantic analysis mapping 110M+ connections across 1.5M words. Previously: SpicyNodes (40M users), time.gov (pioneering govt web service), medical AI serving 1.5M patients.

I lead teams or ship directly via AI-assisted architecture. Looking for Series A-C companies (10-50 people) with products that need to feel less like enterprise Java circa 2003. Developer tools, learning platforms, technical products with adoption friction.

Seeking: Head of Product Experience, Director of Developer Experience, or whatever you call the role that makes your product sing.

  Latest: https://www.inotherwords.app
  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeldouma/

  Location: Takoma Park, MD, USA
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Python, Swift, JavaScript, semantic networks, WebGL, LLMs, system architecture
  Site/Portfolio: https://www.michaeldouma.com
  Email: m5@inotherwords-studio.com

Was #1 on HN this summer with semantic analysis mapping 110M connections across 1.5M words. Turned that into award-winning word games (IndiePrize, Apple Arcade finalist, NSF funded).

I judge for leading games and educational games awards (MagFest, GEE, CODiE, Serious Games). This gives me sharp insight into what makes consumer apps and games succeed.

My strength is leading technical and creative teams to transform complex systems into experiences people love. Career highlights: invented Time.gov at NIST, created SpicyNodes visualization platform (315K creators, 40M users), pioneered semantic wordplay games. After 25 years of architecting systems and leading teams up to 40 people, I also ship production code with AI tools.

Seeking: Head of Product/Design, VP Product, or problems worth solving

  Latest: https://www.inotherwords.app
  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeldouma/

  Location: Takoma Park, MD, USA
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Python, JavaScript, Swift, React, PostgreSQL, Data pipelines, LLMs/AI, Game engines, Real-time systems
  Site/Portfolio: https://www.michaeldouma.com
  Email: m5@inotherwords-studio.com

I was #1 on HN last month with my semantic analysis of English. That analysis mapped 110M+ semantic connections across 1.5M+ words. I've turned that data into a daily word game about pathfinding through the multidimensional universe of language.

I transform complex systems into experiences users want to use, and bring 10 years of indie puzzle gaming insights to both gaming and non-gaming software:

* Design onboarding where users learn by doing, revealing features as users are ready

* Create products people use because they want to, not have to; make the 100th use as rewarding as the first

* Build "aha!" experiences into routine workflows, and crafting features worth showing off (no forced virality)

Track record of making complex systems intuitive: SpicyNodes (40M users), time.gov (2M monthly), medical AI for 1.5M patients. PI on $295K NSF SBIR. Led diverse teams up to 40 people - engineers, designers, artists, writers, operations - plus managed 200+ contractors. I excel at uniting creative and technical talent.

Seeking: VP Product or Head of Product at companies building AI products, knowledge tools, or creative applications. I architect systems and lead teams that ship products people love.

  Latest: https://www.inotherwords.app
  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeldouma/

  Location: Takoma Park, MD, USA
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: VP Product (AI), Game Design, Complex Systems, Data Architecture, Ships Products People Love

I was #1 on HN last month with my semantic analysis of English. Now I'm looking to help another technical product become more human.

What I deliver (bringing 10 years of indie puzzle gaming insights to software):

* Tutorial thinking - Design onboarding where users learn by doing, not reading docs

* Progressive complexity - Reveal features as users are ready, not all at once

* Intrinsic motivation - Create products people use because they want to, not have to

* Discovery moments - Build "aha!" experiences into routine workflows

* Natural sharing - Design features worth showing off (no forced virality)

* Satisfaction loops - Make the 100th use as rewarding as the first

Previously: SpicyNodes (40M users), time.gov (2M monthly), medical AI for 1.5M patients. PI on $295K NSF SBIR. I excel at the intersection of technical depth and human understanding - whether building atomic clock interfaces or language models.

Seeking: VP Product or CPO role at companies building AI products. Particularly interested in semantic search, knowledge tools, or creative AI applications. I lead teams of creative and technical people, and leverage those same skills to architect and ship production code (Swift, Python, etc.) via modern AI tools - decades of managing developers taught me exactly how to direct technical work.

  Portfolio: https://www.michaeldouma.com
  Latest: https://www.inotherwords.app
  Email: m5@inotherwords-studio.com
  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeldouma/

SEEKING WORK | Takoma Park, MD | Remote | Product Strategy & AI/UX Innovation

Hey, I was #1 on HN last month - maybe you saw my white paper on the small world of English? That analysis mapped 110M+ semantic connections across 1.5M+ words. I've now turned that data into a daily word game that explores how humans naturally connect ideas.

This is what I do: transform complex systems into experiences people love.

Previously: Evolved SpicyNodes from academic visualization to 40M users. Transformed NIST timing software into time.gov. Converted medical AI research into patient tools serving 1.5M users. PI on $295K NSF SBIR for semantic innovation.

Core expertise: Taking technically sophisticated systems and creating intuitive interfaces that preserve depth while enabling broad adoption. From atomic clocks to language models.

Available for: VP Product/CPO roles, founding product positions, strategic advisory

Portfolio: https://www.michaeldouma.com Latest: https://www.inotherwords.app Email: m5@inotherwords-studio.com

  Location: Takoma Park, MD, USA
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: VP Product (AI), Game Design, Complex Systems, Data Architecture, Ships Products People Love
  Email: m5@inotherwords-studio.com
  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeldouma/

My work with the small world of English was featured #1 on HackerNews last month.

Product/UX leader who builds AI experiences that spark joy and connection. Recently mapped 110M+ relationships across 1.5M+ words - now launched as a daily game.

Track record of making complex systems intuitive: - Scaled SpicyNodes to 40M users (acquired) - Launched time.gov at NIST - transforming lab software into public service - Converted academic medical AI → patient tools serving 1.5M users - Founded In Other Words studio - award-winning semantic games (IndiePrize, TIGA) - Secured $295K NSF SBIR for semantic innovation

I excel at the intersection of technical depth and human understanding - whether building atomic clock interfaces, medical AI, or language models. Led teams up to 40 people across engineering, design, and research.

Seeking: VP Product or CPO role at companies building AI products for consumers or creators. Particularly interested in semantic search, knowledge tools, or creative AI applications. Open to founding product leader roles at Series A+ startups.

What I bring: Deep technical fluency + proven ability to ship products people love. Judge for Gee Awards, CODiE, Serious Play awards. I understand both how AI works and how humans think.

Portfolio: https://www.michaeldouma.com Just launched: https://www.inotherwords.app

It's true!

And where and how do people discover new word games?

Thanks for that datcreativity.com link. My score was 94.11, higher than 99.88% of the people who have completed this task! I should hope so after working on relations for years. ;)

My words were: apple, shotgun, stardust, anger, hygiene, etymology, proctology, slant, dictator, and displacement.

For good or bad, Semantle is able to report hot/cold because it's vector-based. We tried a few types of vectors, but I thought they were consistently unintuitive. So the best (and most relevant) proxy is remaining shortest distance-to-target, but often the player is only two hops away (spanning 17^2=289 options), and when they go astray and are much further, it's computationally too slow to look out more than 5 hops with brute force.

Thanks!.... Does anyone pay for thesaurus APIs anymore?

And they are full of wiki markup, templates, and inconsistent formatting. A human brain can easily understand it, but automated parsing is impossible (pre LLM).

Longest paths: The tail maxes out at 15 hops. These extreme paths are disappointingly mechanical—not the poetic distances you'd hope for:

* Technical jargon → unrelated obscurities: gryllacridid (cricket family) → microclots * Proper nouns → common words: Trish Stratus (wrestler) → federating Numbers → anything: 9451 → shoulds

Mostly hyper-specific terms with few inbound connections, obscure conjugations, or rare idioms.

Superconnectors: We systematically removed generic hubs, but your question prompted us to analyze which words still act as natural bridges. Added it to the article with an interactive explorer! Top survivors:

* polish (0.18% of paths) - verb/nationality homograph * symbiosis (0.14%) - biology → cooperation bridge * treaty (0.13%) - conflict → resolution bridge

Thanks for the curiosity—it led to an interesting addition. Age correlation: No hard data, but I suspect you're right. Older words have had centuries to accumulate meanings and develop polysemous bridges.

Sorry! The problem is ~2kb of data per 1.5M headwords. We already use indicies and brotli compression internally. I doubt we could smush below 3GB.

Thanks for reporting on your experience! Those are good questions, and I will think about your valence idea for the future.

On a shorter horizon, I can tune the probability that on-path terms appear in the cloud. We store a larger pool of words than are displayed, and calculate lookaheads (and lookbacks from the target).

You are right. I replaced it with new paths that are +1 longer. These are actual paths from our game now.

I second that! I have edited a few Wiktionary pages myself, and find it's a better overall environment than Wikipedia, if you can find something meaningful to add.

That's an interesting puzzle. I hope more types of word puzzles continue to be created.

Yes. I love Google Ngrams.

We use the top google Ngrams in 2 ways. (a) we share it in the reference mode of our app, i.e. common words before or after; (b) we use longer N-grams, where possible, like a 4-gram, to choose literary examples that also show a common pattern.

Good points. The main limiter is often what words happen to surface as the top 17 connections, or in those random examples when there's a plural or conjugation.

Since this is getting eyeballs here, I will look for some less tortured long-paths to add as examples.

I wish it were not so! Here's the breakdown: 1.5M headwords × ~2KB average per entry >= 3GB Each entry contains: 40 associations in the core graph Multiple senses (up to 8) × 17 associations each = up to 136 more Stems and morphological variants In-game clue definitions Longer definition entries with several types of related word lists.

The only good news is it works offline.

Thanks for your interest! The data is used in our iOS game and visualizer.

Removed an ill-concieved backdrop-filter: blur(10px); downsampled the images, and some other little fixes.

thanks. Let me see if I can diagnose the scrolling lag.

Early on, I tried both older (Word2Vec & GloVe), and later newer (OpenAI's ada + the text-embedding-3-x).

We built a 1.5M word semantic network where any two words connect in ~6.43 hops (76% connect in ≤7). The hard part wasn't the graph theory—it was getting rich, non-obvious associations. GPT-4's associations were painfully generic: "coffee → beverage, caffeine, morning." But we discovered LLMs excel at validation, not generation. Our solution: Mine Library of Congress classifications (648k of them, representing 125 years of human categorization). "Coffee" appears in 2,542 different book classifications—from "Coffee trade—Labor—Guatemala" to "Coffee rust disease—Hawaii." Each classification became a focused prompt for generating domain-specific associations. Then we inverted the index: which classifications contain both "algorithm" and "fractals"? Turns out: "Mathematics in art" and "Algorithmic composition." This revealed connections like algorithm→Fibonacci→golden ratio that pure co-occurrence or word vectors miss. The "Montreal Effect" nearly tanked the project—geographic contamination where "bagels" spuriously linked to "Expo 67" because Montreal is famous for bagels. We used LLMs to filter true semantic relationships from geographic coincidence. Technical details: 80M API calls, superconnector deprecation (inverse document frequency variant), morphological deduplication. Built for a word game but the dataset has broader applications.

  Location: Takoma Park, MD, USA
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: LLM systems, semantic search, information visualization, product strategy, human-AI interaction
  Experience: 25+ years building digital experiences that connect people
  Email: m5@inotherwords-studio.com
  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeldouma/

Get in touch if you need a product leader who turns complex AI/data systems into experiences people actually love using. Co-founder of In Other Words studio creating award-winning semantic games (IndiePrize, TIGA, Serious Play). Recently built LLM-powered system navigating 1.5M+ words with 110M+ semantic relationships.

Previously scaled SpicyNodes visualization platform to 40 million users and 350K+ creators. Launched time.gov at NIST (first single-purpose .gov site). Transformed academic medical AI into patient-friendly tools serving 1.5M users. Secured $295K NSF SBIR funding for semantic innovation.

Deep expertise making sophisticated systems accessible - whether that's atomic clocks, medical AI, or language models. Led cross-functional teams up to 40 people. Judge for CODiE, Serious Play, and Reimagine Education awards.

Seeking VP Product / Chief Product Officer role at AI-first companies that need someone who understands both the technical depth and human psychology of information systems.

Portfolio: https://www.michaeldouma.com/projects.html Just launched: https://www.inotherwords.app

  Location: Takoma Park, MD
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: information visualization, team leadership, LLM fine-tuning, RAG systems, semantic games
  Email: m5@inotherwords-studio.com

Portfolio: https://www.michaeldouma.com/projects.html

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeldouma/

For a small business anchored around data visualization, how people interact with information, or meaningful and thoughtful play, I bring a unique skill set that straddles product, UI/UX, design, and growth. I'm a technical leader in areas of LLM implementation, semantics (words!), visualization, and puzzle games. Founded In Other Words studio creating award-winning semantic games (IndiePrize, TIGA, Serious Play). Previously led SpicyNodes visualization platform reaching 350K+ users. Secured $295K NSF funding for technical innovation. Managed cross-functional teams up to 40 people, bridging technical capabilities with user engagement. In recent years, I've been an industry judge for CODiE, Serious Play, and Reimagine Education awards. I'd love to talk to startups needing leadership that balances creative vision with technical depth to handle challenges around complex information in intuitive, engaging products.

Just launched: A unique idea-linking game: https://www.inotherwords.app