Beyond the Resume
I build fantasy worlds, make things with my hands, and spend too much time teaching a teenager to drive.
Twenty years of program and delivery work tells you what I've built. It doesn't tell you much about who's doing the building. I live in Westminster, Colorado, with my family, and the version of me here is closer to the real one than anything on the career page.
The Worlds I've Built
For the last twelve years I've been building an entire fantasy and science fiction universe from the ground up. Three interconnected series, its own history, its own rules. It started as writing and turned into worldbuilding, then into something I don't quite have a word for.
At some point I realized the characters needed their own language to feel real. Not just vocabulary, but grammar, idiom, the rhythm of how people actually talk. It came from asking a question most writers never get to: what would it sound like for a woman to yell at her kid in an alien market?
It's a card game now too. A collectible card game set in the same universe. Still building that one.
The Maker
I've got a workshop. A skillsaw, a 3D printer, a laser engraver. I built my own PC. There's something about making things with your hands that writing and delivery calendars can't replace. You measure wrong, the thing doesn't fit. No spin, no retrospective, just physics.
I also built my own agentic OS. Named it after a certain character in a movie with a certain AI that oversaw a bunker full of zombies in a city named after an animal. Named it before Jarvis was everyone's go-to reference. And for the record, that AI predates Jarvis on the silver screen by over a decade.
The Real World
I've been with my wife since we were eighteen. Married twenty years, together for thirty. Two teenage girls, one terrier named Maple, and the kind of life where the most frequent requests include "drive me to so-and-so's house for a sleepover," me panicking "remember to use your turn signal" while teaching a fifteen year old to drive, and "we really need to mow the lawn."
I wouldn't trade any of it for it to be different. They keep me grounded, they keep me sane.
The Reset
Camping and hunting clear my mind in a way nothing else does. New terrain, new problems to solve, no notifications, no calendars. Just weather and landscape making the decisions instead of me.
I don't think I know how to stop building systems. So once or twice a season, I go somewhere there's nothing left to build. It reminds me I'm not a machine.