About me

Backend developer based in Virginia. I build things that work quietly and well. Occasionally I point a camera at interesting architecture.*

Hello! I'm a backend developer by trade. Outside of work I enjoy (the concept of) photography and watch a lot of movies. I'm based in Virginia where I live with my wife and no pets.

About this site

The first code I remember writing was a while loop with some basic string replacement that went through my relatives names and output perfectly serviceable thank you cards. While my mother stood on the way of this initial plan, my thirst for automation persists decades later. My first job out of school I had full-stack on my résumé. It took all of a few months of fighting with jquery to realize that front-end was not for me. I just don't want to think about where exactly on the page something goes. I found interesting problems to solve in back-end, but it felt more like math than art. That is, I had nothing pretty to show for it beyond grafana dashboards which don't count.

Another childhood memory: going to a lot of art museums. At these, the artist would get all the credit, and some blurb would offhandedly remark that the artist had done the real work of having the idea, and any old student could be left with the (tedious) implementation. Inspiring.

I gave Claude my strong opinions on fonts, color schemes, how little I'm willing to pay in hosting costs, and together we made my new and improved website. I'm going to leave most of what Claude wrote. Based on what it knows about me the opinions it espouses aren't wrong, but they sound like they were written by a robot. I'm going to highlight it like so and add context. The human touch. I think AI is neat; and maybe one day it'll let me retire in a post scarcity society, but for now I find the mix of machine and human interesting. This website would be worse if I did it all myself (you should have seen the last site), but I think my job is safe for the next couple of years. I'd consider this website a résumé, a link tree, maybe some kind of performance art?