Product, Design, Engineering, Data Science. Marketing agencies, innovation studios, in-house. I’ve done all three, and moved between them on purpose.
I like the cutting edge, but the technology is often the easy part. People and process are the work.
My job is turning insight and intuition into decisions. Curious and creative first, rigorous second. Prototypes over decks. Experiments over opinions. I’ve killed ideas I liked because the data didn’t back them, and shipped ones I didn’t because it did.
Sometimes I lead from the front. Sometimes the best thing I can do is get out of the way. Either way, the work only gets good when people feel valued and safe enough to be wrong in front of each other. Self-esteem powers bravery.
When my dear friend Pete first introduced me to web design back in the mid-90s, the term “Webmaster” was used to describe someone who was a hybrid designer, coder, and sysadmin. I narrowly missed that title (I know, gutted), but I did start out juggling Photoshop, BBEdit, Fetch, Explorer and Netscape to do my job.
Sometimes, if I was feeling reckless, I’d even edit code live on the FTP server, refreshing the browser window to test it!
Old experiments nobody asked for sit on the site, forgotten. Two of them just got asked for at once.
CLI Personality, four numbers I tuned by feel back in 2024. SAM, a browser replica of a 1982 text-to-speech program, built earlier this summer. Both turned up again while building my site’s self-hosted AI search assistant.
Also: a Random Walk toggle, and why a plain-text answer can have a temperament and a voice.