About

I’m Leonard Lin and random($foo) is my personal site, which I’ve been running in some form or another for over two decades. The topic matter fluctuates but tends to center around things I’m interested in, including (but not limited to of course) web/social/mobile/emerging technologies, gadgets and hardware, public policy and politics, finance and economics, music, and the arts.

If you need to reach me by email, send it to lhl at this domain. Please, no solicitations.

I’m currently working on:

  • AUGMXNT – an umbrella (applied research lab?) for the things that catch my interests. This currently includes: VR/XR, cryptocurrency/decentralized networks, personal informatics/quantified self, social media/networks, etc.

My interest is easy to pique, and over the years, I’ve worked on a lot of different projects, you might know me from:

  • Lensley – Photobooths for the 21st Century; specializing in brand activations, events, tours and permanent installations; we have a product platform, build custom hardware/software, and ship/man/service across the country and even internationally
  • Machine Project – an awesome LA community/arts non-profit that I was privileged to be on the board
  • Code for America – bridging web geeks and municipal IT to build better civic software; helped to get the ball rolling (first acting CTO, board member)
  • Elgg – Advised open-source social networking platform for organizations (edu, non-profits, intranets)
  • SCHED* – helped build better schedules for music festivals and conferences
  • Working on the Obama ’08 campaign building the digital infrastructure (MyBO) at Blue State Digital; core scaling/infrastructure work, donation processing, events
  • Wacky fun LBS stuff like Fireball and Blueball
  • Running the Hack internal innovation program and Hack Days at Yahoo!
  • Helping make the first WhereCamp happen (and designing the shirt!) among other developer community related “stuff”
  • Co-founding Upcoming w/ Andy and Gordon (sold to Yahoo! in 2005), some of the first implementations of Web 2.0 APIs, groups, activity feeds; neo-geo
  • Working on Katrinalist survivor scraping and consolidation
  • Various projects w/ Downhill Battle (now PCF)
  • Internet Veterans For Truth (we distributed a lot of videos right before the election in ’04)
  • Flash version of Free Culture for Lawrence Lessig
  • Original tag filtering/balancing libraries used in WordPress, Metafilter. This the oldest code I’ve written that I know is still in use, I wrote a little bit about it here

Check out my LinkedIn for more of a CV.

I’ve traveled to a decent number of places and plan to travel to quite a few more.

    You can find me elsewhere online at:

    About the Site

    I’ve been blogging here since 1999, which sprang out of a combination of earlier personal journaling and some blogs I created for school. Over the years, I’ve gone through a variety of tools: Blogger, a couple custom solutions, and currently WordPress.

    The topic matter has tended to shift with my interests, but is usually some combination of links and writing around the web, technology, politics, and music.