About Me
I'm in my 40's and I'm far too lazy to perform any kind of manual labor, so I make computers do stuff for me instead. I've been doing that since before the Internet had pictures. I started off pretending to be an adult on the dial-up bulletin board systems local to me deep in the woods of rural Virginia. I eventually ended up running my own infrequently visited Renegade BBS.
But once I dialed into the Internet for the first time, that was it for my BBS career. Already obsessed with technology (see: nerd genesis on the right), the Internet super-charged my curiosity and I became one of those little annoying hacker punks from the early 90s. That was a fun time and I met a lot of interesting and smart people.
I put on a white hat sometime in the early 2000s and never took it off again. I never forgot how to think like a hacker, though. That deeply ingrained critical thinking and paranoia has served me well in my career. More people should be more paranoid.
My entire life revolved around World of Warcraft for a stint, where I played mostly support classes because I like to help people. Near the end of my WoW career, I decided to stop helping people and I was ranked as one of the top 100 mages in the world for a very short period of time, which has no intrinsic value or meaning. Once I realized that, I eased into a life as a responsible and gainfully employed adult — once again helping people.
That basically catches you up to now. When I'm not coding for work, I'm coding for fun, and when I'm not coding at all, I'm sifting through piles of music looking for new stuff to love, watching movies or brainrot with my friends in Bigscreen VR, scrolling through YouTube slop with my wife, writing, or making my own music.
Skills
My languages of choice are JavaScript, TypeScript, and Python. I built this site from scratch using SvelteKit and it's made highly available via Cloudflare Workers. In the past, I have worked professionally as a cloud infrastructure engineer (AWS), a tier 2 support engineer (PHP), and an IT manager handling NetEng/VoIP for a medical practice.
I tend to over-engineer stuff when I get into a flow state. Did you notice that the square gradients on my logo at the top left and the blog post previews are both procedurally generated? The gradient at the top left tracks the position of the sun or the moon relative to my location, and the gradient in the featured image of my blog posts is generated based on the length of the post; the longer the post, the more squares there are.
Random Facts
- I have been married to my wife for nearly 20 years!
- I have two pets. An American Pitbull Terrier mix named Baloo, who is the smartest dog I've ever had, and a calico cat named Jester, who is the dumbest animal I've ever met. She is sweet, though... An incredibly annoying menace but also sweet.
- I've been on the Internet since 1995. I started out with a BSD/OS dialup shell using a free account that my brother "borrowed" from an ISP he worked at as a network engineer.
- I've been writing and producing music for over three decades and miraculously, it's still not great... Getting a lot better recently, though!
- I used to do graphic design professionally and I viscerally hated it. In fact, that experience is why I'm not too concerned about AI taking jobs away from artists. A disproportionate number of clients have no idea what they want, which is a prerequisite for using generative AI effectively.
- I love to study storytelling and I read screenplays for fun. It makes me kind of insufferable to watch poorly written movies and television with sometimes. On the other hand, it allows me to truly appreciate how skilled a good writer can be.
- I know how to read weather radar data and I can spot the conditions for tornadoes before the National Weather Service issues warnings for them. In other words... I'm a party animal!
- I put an entertainment center together backwards one time and now I'm not allowed to assemble furniture anymore.