I build data systems for the people who run health programs.

I have been teaching myself since I was a kid.  I learned HTML by viewing the source of websites and rebuilding what I found in Notepad, then used FrontPage, Dreamweaver and Photoshop to experiment further.  At 13 I was running EverQuest emulators and built a working PC out of broken ones.

Helping people with technology started early, too.  In the mid-2000s I wrote a guide to hosting your own dedicated Counter-Strike server, and the official Valve forums for Counter-Strike pinned it for other players.  I went looking for people with computer problems on forums and helped them for free, aiming to fix each problem without anyone buying new parts.  It was all done in writing: about half of them had a microphone, and nobody had a camera.  Years later, at the Geek Squad front desk at Best Buy, the hardest part of the job was keeping appointments to their allotted time, because I wanted to answer every question and pass along every tip.

None of it was formal.  I learned what the work of the moment or my curiosity called for, mostly from examples I took apart and got running myself.  Documentation came late: I could not really read it until about 2020.  Since then I have added Bjarne Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language, the official documentation for the tools I use and thousands of hours of study, and I still study every day.

I enjoy learning how a tool will be used: where it will live, who will use it, what it replaces and whatever else shapes it.  A tool has to fit the people who use it and the environment they work in.  The platform I developed under the name Penji, now being rolled out as Lukio, is built for coordinators across the U.S.-Affiliated Pacific Islands, where many connections run at 28 kbps and drop in and out.  It works online and holds its state through each dropout, so nobody loses work in the middle of a form, and it installs from a download under 5 MB. The aim is a tool that is ergonomic, correct, useful and efficient, and that makes the work it serves easier.

I look for the right solution.  I don't always find it on the first attempt.  I close in on it quickly: I adjust my sights to your parameters, then do the field work and the study the problem calls for.  When I take something on, I go deep, often late into the night, until I understand it in full.

I build the AI tools my work needs, like agent teams, councils and review processes.  I also keep an eye on what others are building, and when a tool of real production quality serves the need, I adopt it.  I like building my own, using what's out there and finding out what other people are doing.  There's a lot I don't know, even though I work to keep up.  Angular ships updates regularly, the rest of programming keeps moving, and there is always more community and open-source work and more projects to explore.  The learning never stops, and I remain self-driven and self-taught.

Outside of work I am building Sands, a multiplayer game in Unreal Engine 5, from its C++ gameplay systems and peer-to-peer networking to its 3D art.  I also build tools and mods for existing software, often with AI assistance.  One of them, EQ Observer, is a companion app for players of an online game first released in 1999.