Why this site exists

Really, this entire site exists because I can’t resist a good pun. And I like to make things. And sometimes random ideas pop up in my head and I just can’t stop thinking about them until I see them come to life.

I’m a builder, a hacker in the old school non-pejorative sense. Hacking to me is the art of the possible, exploring unknowns and building new systems. And right or wrong, good bad or ugly, that’s the kind of thing that drives me. I’m the type of person that will look at a perfectly functional product - be it software, hardware, electronic, wood or really anything - and think “It’d be a blast to figure out how to do that!”.

My amazing (and patient!) spouse is the same. When we bought a pool and needed to level our backyard and build a retaining wall she phoned a friend and was the first one to turn the keys in the mini excavator. We asked a relative to use their civil engineering CAD skills to lay out the tile pattern in our bathroom as part of remodeling our house. I spent months tracing the wiring in my house and hand wiring dozens of Shelly relays into every switch and device in our home so we have a 100% local, secure and reliable home automation & orchestration platform. Permanent custom WLED holiday lighting, BirdNET-Pi birdsong detectors, custom irrigation controllers.

I wanted a home for all my projects. And, I wanted a place where I can transparently and openly share what I’m working on and what I’m learning. Since 2011 I’ve had the good fortune to have led engineering teams in some capacity, and above all else I want to demonstrate the curiosity and willingness to experiment - and fail! - that I encourage my teams to have.

I was uniquely lucky as a kid, in that my uncle was into computers and my grandparents were indulgent. I was fascinated by computers at first sight. I can remember the awe I felt in preschool when I witnessed something coming to life from a cassette tape. Indulge me for a moment while I veer into “back in my day, it was uphill both ways!” territory. My first computer was an Atari 800XL with a 300 baud modem. Baud, mind you, bits per second. 300 bits per second, approximately 37 bytes per second, 0.3 kbps or 0.0003 Mbps. I was selective in toggling color text from the Bulletin Board System (BBS) I was dialing in to because color text was sooooo slow.

I’ve loved working with these machines and these technologies ever since. I’ve played Legend of the Red Dragon at 300 baud, wired splices & cutouts into my house’s phone lines so my friends and I could play dialup two player Doom all night without waking my parents, lugged monitors and monster modded towers to countless LAN games, waited for countless RAR files to finish coming in off Usenet so I could finally try out that software everyone was talking about, lugged countless Palm Pilots and horribly kludgy “smart” phones around, built servers, built data centers, then virtualization stacks and then shifted to virtualizing it all in the major cloud platform providers. The rise of Large Language Models is relentlessly fascinating to me - the curious technologist in me loves experimenting with them and seeing what they can do. The pragmatic engineer in me is skeptical and learning how to safely, responsibly and effectively utilize them in my work.

It’s the curious builder in me - I can’t not poke & prod & test. And the part that has me hooked is that these tools are objectively effective, as far as my experimentation goes. I started out with a strong bias against LLM assisted coding (or agentic engineering or vibe coding or whatever you call it) but the more I set up experiments to find the limits the more I begrudgingly found myself liking what could be done with them.

I’m not the best at any of this, there’s thousands of other blogs and Substacks from thousands of other people that are infinitely more qualified than me and that’s awesome. I’m doing this because I enjoy it, almost as much as a good pun.