I grew up in Eugene, OR. I spent too much time playing video games and Dungeons and Dragons. I built websites for my video game guilds. Tinkered with Hypercard and programming languages. I hung out on the local BBS playing Legend of the Red Dragon. I played music, mostly by myself, and recorded it onto a Tascam 424. I read comic books and carried my mac and monitor over to friend's houses to play the very old precursor to Halo, called Marathon, which Bungie made before they were bought by Microsoft.

That's all a long way of saying I did not have a girlfriend until I went to college.

I went to college at UC Santa Cruz, aiming for an engineering degree as well as a BA. I bounced around math and physics, ended up getting a Literature degree. My parents are very patient people.

Then I moved to San Francisco and did some music writing for the SF Bay Guardian. A friend got me an internship at WIRED and I went from intern, to web producer, to web editor, to launching the Raw File photography blog and running the photo department for the website.

I met my wife on the 5 Fulton bus as we were both headed to work in SOMA. We were married at Dawn Ranch in Guerneville, CA. A few years later we were lucky enough to have a home birth with our first daughter.  

After nine years at WIRED I left to do photo and content editing for Medium, mostly for brand partnerships. We were pregnant with our second child and realized we were stranded in our rent controlled apartment. If we had to move for some reason, we could no longer afford to stay in San Francisco.

Meanwhile I had thought I might be a lawyer but didn't do well enough on the LSATs to go to a big name school in the area. Also we were starting to see law school grads struggling to find work after graduation around that time.

So I switched from dabbling in web development to making a career out of it. I left Medium and we moved up to Portland to start a more sane life, basically setting fire to 10 years of my editorial resume.

Luckily software is an under-served market and I was able to get by. In Portland we were closer to family and could actually afford a house. My wife was six months pregnant during the move and subsequent housing search. That was by far the most stressful year of my life.

We found our current home in time to have a home birth for our second daughter.

After a few years at a software consultancy, I struck out to do freelance and now I'm building the things I think should exist at Re-Public.

I also used to blog about data ownership at The Tools We Need. I started Mind Lasers so that readers at The Tools We Need wouldn't have to put up with my off-topic ramblings. I'm happy you're here.