Sam Patterson

Technical Builder & Communicator

Resume

Sam Patterson

Technical Builder & Communicator

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Grand Rapids, MI·sam@sampatt.com·LinkedIn·GitHub

I've spent 15 years building at the intersection of technology, communication, and community — from founding a tech policy program in DC, to co-founding a venture-backed decentralized marketplace, to writing about Bitcoin before most people had heard of it. Today I build AI-powered tools and write about emerging technology, regularly reaching the front page of Hacker News.

Experience

Co-Founder & Head of Operations

OB1 (OpenBazaar)
2015 – 2020Remote
  • Co-founded and helped build OpenBazaar, an open-source decentralized marketplace using Bitcoin for peer-to-peer commerce
  • Raised $9M in venture capital from Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures
  • Served as developer advocate and documentation lead, managing a global open-source community
  • Featured in Wired, Forbes, Yahoo Finance; presented at conferences in Prague, Guatemala, New Hampshire

Senior Policy Analyst & Research Fellow

Stand Together
2011 – 2015Washington DC
  • Founded and directed the technology policy program
  • Conducted research on how technology policy affects individual well-being
  • Created the Crony Chronicles project, a public awareness initiative on political cronyism

Freelance Technical Writer & Voiceover Artist

2020 – PresentRemote
  • Technical tutorials and educational content for open-source projects
  • Recorded and published audiobooks on Audible
  • Blog writing with multiple Hacker News front-page hits

Selected Writing & Research

Visualizing Why Bitcoin Can't Work Over HF RadioInteractive visualization + video
Artificial Advocates: Biasing Democratic Feedback Using AI3rd place, Apart Hackathon — led to Apart Labs Fellowship
Bitcoin BeginnerOne of the first books published about Bitcoin (2013)
Breakdown of All Satoshi's WritingsAnalysis with accompanying video

Technical Skills

PythonJavaScriptReactNode.jsPostgreSQLLinuxGitAI/LLM IntegrationWebRTCSelf-hosted InfrastructureTechnical WritingDeveloper Advocacy

Education

General Assembly — Full-Stack Software Engineering Immersive2024
Alfred University — B.A. Political Science2010

Presentations

Hacker's Congress, Paralelní Polis (Prague) · CryptoEcon Conference (Saigon) · Hillsdale College Free Market Forum · PorcFest XIII (New Hampshire) · Universidad Francisco Marroquín (Guatemala) · Liberty.me