About / Now

The longer version, for anyone who wants it.

I started on BASIC, on an Apple ][e, then C and Perl before dial-up modems reshuffled the whole learning curve. The web was a wild, unfinished frontier back then — genuinely fun, genuinely new, nobody had decided what it was for. Twenty-six years later I’m still chasing that feeling, just with better tools.

There’s no straight line here — I’m forty, and somewhere in the middle of all that code there’s also been bartending, working a door as a bouncer, laying seamless epoxy floors, and swinging a hammer on construction crews. Not because the tech didn’t stick. A tidy chronological resume was never on the table, and I’d rather tell you the truth than manufacture one.

Kohort is where I cut my startup teeth — a great team, more nights under my desk than I’ll admit, and where I learned to lead engineers instead of just being the smartest person in the room. That took me from the Green Mountains of Vermont to Manhattan.

My brother calls me the “internal-combustion whisperer” — I can get almost anything gas-powered running again, and I mean that as a real skill, not a folksy aside. Same instinct as the software: understand the system, find what’s actually wrong with it, fix it. Doesn’t matter if it’s a codebase or a lawnmower.

The nuances and exceptions in how a line of business actually runs — the stuff that never makes it into the pitch deck — are where I live.

Elegant data plumbing that quietly protects a growing company’s momentum is a beautiful thing to me. I mean it.

Emberplane is me applying the same instinct without a client: a full AI-native memory system — CLI, workspace daemon, semantic memory on pgvector, a trust-boundary console that’s the only thing allowed to write to it, a native iOS app — built solo in Go. It needed real boundaries, not a chatbot with file access. It’s mothballed now. The architecture isn’t a demo; it’s what gets built when nobody’s paying me to cut corners.

It’s not even the first time I’ve built this thesis. Rewind.me, under the deals platform, was trying to answer “what was I even doing last month?” — context over time, for one person’s life. That thesis wasn’t mine. Emberplane asks the same question for a codebase or a business, and this time the thesis is mine.

Outside of code: a few acres out in Terlingua, in the far-flung corner of Texas that’s more or less adopted me, and music that’s been a constant the whole way through.