I’ve been building things on the web since around 2008. Full-stack, eyes-everywhere, the kind of developer whose cursor goes straight to the typo or the one-pixel-misaligned image without being asked. 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 genuinely 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 like the moment when a 25-minute build becomes a 1-minute build and everyone on the team gets their afternoons back. Small wins, big wins, I’m not picky.
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 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. I’m still happiest somewhere between “solving my own problem” and “solving it well enough that other people might want it 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.
The through-line
If there’s a consistent thing across the work, the projects, and the side of life that isn’t work at all, it’s that I notice when something is a little off and I can’t quite leave it there. The misused apostrophe. The 25-minute build. The brown sign I can’t identify from the highway. The external drives making noises under my desk. Most of the apps I’ve shipped started because something annoyed me enough that fixing it felt like a better use of a Saturday than complaining about it. That’s maybe the most honest thing I can tell you about how I work.