I’ve been building things on the web since around 2008. I do full-stack work, and I’m the one whose cursor goes to the image that’s one pixel off before anyone mentions it. Fifteen-plus years in, I still like it. That probably says something.
The work
I’ve spent most of my career as a senior engineer. Vue, Angular, TypeScript, Node, the usual senior-frontend toolkit, with enough backend depth to hold up my end of a conversation. I like migrations, because they’re the projects where you get to make something better instead of adding another feature to the pile. I like accessibility, because it’s the part of the job that’s obviously the right thing to do and weirdly easy to half-ass, so doing it properly feels like real work. I’m not picky about the size of the win.
I also have the bug for making my own things, and lately it’s gotten a little out of hand. A few have landed on the App Store (a highway-sign scanner called Brown Sign, a debt-payoff planner called Debt Descent that runs on my phone, iPad, and Mac, and a Mac password-health auditor called ReKey), a couple more live as signed downloads you install yourself, and one’s still being built in public, a display-matching tool that may or may not stay open source depending on how the commercial side shakes out. I’ll spare you the rest; the full list is there if you want it. The ones I’m happiest with started as my own problem and turned out to be useful to other people too.
The rest
I bought my first house in 2023, a few months after my cat Thomas died at twelve. He was with me through a lot of apartments and one very long hike, and the house felt empty without a cat in it, so I rescued Stefan, who was about a year old when I got him and has opinions about everything. My girlfriend Gina moved in last May. The house is much louder than it used to be, in every good way.
I’ve been a long-distance hiker for most of my adult life. I spent about three months walking 650 miles of the Appalachian Trail in 2011 and wrote my way through it on an iPhone from the trail itself, which you can read about under Writing if you’re curious. I’m an insulin-dependent diabetic and a vegetarian, neither of which is especially interesting except when they intersect with the hiking, and then they get interesting fast. I read voraciously. I ski. I travel when I can.
I studied Management Information Systems at Albertus Magnus and then did a master’s in Interactive Media and Communications at Quinnipiac. Somewhere in there I was also an English/Creative Writing major for a minute, which explains a few things.
What they have in common
Most of what I’ve built, at work and on my own, started because something small was wrong and I couldn’t leave it alone. The external drives making noise under my desk turned into Saddle. The debt calculators that wanted one balance and one rate, or my bank login, became Debt Descent. At TriNet it was a twenty-five-minute build that had no reason to take longer than one. Fixing it has always felt like a better use of a Saturday than complaining about it.