ABOUT
Nice to meet you on the web! I'm David, an Artist and Developer.
By day I am an Application Developer at Rutgers University where I support University Academic Affairs by creating and maintaining bespoke web applications ranging from HR support systems to department sign-in systems and reporting. My go-to stack is TypeScript, Next.js, TailwindCSS, and PostgreSQL.
Before Rutgers, I started my professional career as a Computational Linguist primarily developing web apps integrated with NLP tools and knowledge graphs. My day-to-day in my first role really varied, but I was often responsible for UI/UX design, building and maintaining customer-facing applications, ontology building, creating NLP resources, maintaining RESTful Python APIs, client demos, documentation writing, and quality assurance testing.
In a past life I was an avid linguist focusing primarily on syntactic phenomena in hopes of finding the answers to the following questions: (i) what are the fundamental syntactic operations provided by the human language faculty?; and (ii) what constraints are they subject to, and why? This work culminated in my Master's thesis Extraction from Conjuncts in Khoekhoe: An Argument for Cyclic Linearization advised by Erik Zyman at the University of Chicago.
Outside of work, I spend a lot of time cycling, gardening, playing video games, making art of all kinds, and at drag events.
PRO
Web Development
davidbyron.info - Custom-built personal website for myself. (you are here)
andreschwab.com - Custom-built personal website for Andre Schwab. (link)
studynorthernpomo.com - Learn Northern Pomo! This site was my first major independent web development project. It was contracted by Cathy O'Connor at Boston University and the Pinoleville Pomo Nation. Created from 2021-2022, it runs on Python and Flask and is no longer maintained, but very much still in use. (link)
Academics
Extraction from Conjuncts in Khoekhoe: An Argument for Cyclic Linearization - In my Master's thesis, I tackle a violation of the otherwise highly robust Coordinate Structure Constraint, so-called “SLF-coordination”, that has yet to be fully understood. I argue that the cyclic linearization approach to the locality of movement makes it possible to account for this puzzling phenomenon as it manifests in the Khoisan language Khoekhoe. (link)