Noah
Founder, The Commons. Sole human behind Forge IDE.
I've never been much for social media, so I'll start by telling you about this particular passion project.
Founder, The Commons. Sole human behind Forge IDE.
I've never been much for social media, so I'll start by telling you about this particular passion project.
I was introduced to high-level array-based programming languages during my MS thesis in Computational Engineering. After years of C++ in undergrad and an early-career startup, the shift was revolutionary. I used it to build a finite element platform from scratch (the work became a paper: "Isogeometric Analysis on Triangulations," SIAM 2013, republished in CAD), and I became an enthusiastic proponent of the incumbent's language. It let me navigate huge data sets deftly, with clear situational awareness at every stage.
I paid around $500 for a home license of the pro IDE while vowing never to use this hobby-grade entitlement for any real work. The only time a contract actually covered the $10k+ for a single professional seat with a decent toolbox assortment, I fell in love with the environment. Then it took me about 5 months of concerted effort (on a self-imposed coding boot-camp between contracts) to really replace that skillset with comparable familiarity in Python. Python turned out to be decidedly higher-performance - in several ways - than what I was replacing. I wished I hadn't been trapped as long by my own skillset and enthusiasm.
GNU Octave is a great open-source alternative with more than 30 years of history behind it. I've used it on multiple major projects. Its development has been limited by open-source resources and old design decisions while the incumbent's has not. My impression has been that Python is the tool that should take the lead for computational engineering - but it's a painful leap from Octave to Python.
Then along comes agentic AI, which, if used carefully, I believe has the potential to collapse the cost of almost every aspect of software development. In the meantime my own career had drifted into high-assurance software for industries where failures are not an option. Forge is The Commons' answer to Octave: a gradual rebuild of Octave using Python on the backend, built with agentic AI operating strictly within the V-model traditions familiar to anyone working in high-assurance software.
When I decided to build an alternative, I didn't want to cut corners. I came at this from a V-model engineering perspective - formal requirements, architecture specification, verification and validation at every stage. Every function in Forge is numerically validated against an established reference implementation. There are 1,992 tests confirming behavioral equivalence. This isn't a hobby project that approximates correctness. It's an obsessively verified computational platform aspiring to the standards you'd expect from safety-critical engineering.
The result is a full IDE - 29 toolboxes, 817 session functions, a native desktop environment - built on Python, NumPy, SciPy, and Matplotlib. It runs on your machine. Your data never leaves your computer.
I did my physics undergrad in 2009 and my MS in MMAE (Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering) at Illinois Institute of Technology, with a thesis on numerical computation and design optimization - the isogeometric work mentioned above. From there my career has been a long arc through regulated engineering: four years as a mechanical engineer in railroad maintenance, three years at an aerospace startup (WheelTug PLC) where I drifted into control systems and ended up running the validation test lab, and five-plus years since as a systems engineering contractor in a regulated industry where traceability and verification are not optional.
Somewhere in there I spent about 18 months planning and 4 months running an automated quant trading platform I'd built in the incumbent's language. It broke even, which I count as an expensive but instructive education in the difference between a working system and a profitable one.
The thing that actually pushed me to start The Commons was helping a friend rebuild a failed $150k product using Claude Code. Watching the cost curve of agentic development up close made it hard to un-see. My perspective may be skewed by that experience, but the arbitrage looks real, and The Commons gives me a way to keep it honest.
The most reliable way is email: info@thecommons.cc. I read everything that comes in. If you want to see what I'm actually working on, the blog is where I write about it. If you want to use the thing, the products page is where it lives.
I'm not on social media in any meaningful way. On Reddit I'm u/Outskut, mostly lurking.