about me

tl;dr:

I'm the Chief Technology Officer of Bionic Giant, a creative agency that delivers agile and affordable solutions that help brands grow.

I'm an entrepreneur who has worked with some amazing people to get some impactful and successful companies off the ground.

I enjoy figuring out how things work, explaining complex technical problems to non-technical people, and doing whatever I can to help get something done (whether that's strategy, executing on a vision, or managing a team).

i've got some time, gimme the longer version.

I have been into computers for as long as I can remember. I can find source code on my computer from websites I built back in 1998. In middle school, I wrote games for the TI-83+ graphing calculator and maintained the internet's largest Ralph Wiggum fan website.

Tech wasn't my only identity, though: I was a center and defensive end in football. I was a drum major in the marching band. I acted and did tech for our school plays and musicals. I played broomball. I was in the National Honor Society. What I enjoyed the most about all those experiences was meeting diverse and interesting people, and then teaming up with them to do something cool.

When I went to college at the University of Minnesota, I kept up that spirit. I helped a group of students spin up a student-run television broadcast club. I joined a band comprised of U of M professors and recorded an album where I got to sing backup vocals. I took a class with others at my fitness level where we learned how to run a marathon.

After college, I tried to put my journalism degree to good use and ended up working as a freelance videographer. I'd partner with bands, pro sports teams, and other businesses and take their ideas, concept them, record them, edit them, and put them up online.

Around the same time, my best friend and I decided to partner up and build a company that builds mobile apps. This turned out to be one of the greatest partnerships of my career to date.

Through that relationship alone, I've gotten to collaborate on dozens of amazing projects like figuring out what it takes to build a self-driving car, developing a way to make traffic stops safer and more equitable, architecting a better way for dental offices to find quality hygienists, and making it nicer for millions of people to schedule their haircut.

After dealing with some mental health struggles, I stepped back from that and joined up with another long time friend and his growing creative agency. I'm currently the CTO there, where we're working to build a solid Ruby on Rails development team to compliment their existing design and video production teams (which are also, in fact, solid).

okay, cool, that's pretty much all work stuff. what else do you do?

I'd say I spend most of my free time hanging out with my family.

My wife and I have been together for eight years now, and we have been on some incredible adventures together. Whether that's traveling throughout Europe and North America, running marathons, singing karaoke, or just chilling on our patio, that's gotta be the part of my life I look forward to the most when I wake up every day.

Another daily highlight is the time I interact with my kids. My daughter is killing it in first grade, and watching her grow up and express herself in her own creative way is such a treat. My son is as defiant and loud as all young humans should be, but he is so charismatic, witty, and loves noodling on tough problems like his old man. They're the best kids I could ask for.

Outside of family time, I don't often get a whole lot of time to myself. I do quite enjoy going on a walk. I used to be super into running, but I blew my knees out and if I'm gonna get back into it, I need to probably be more strategic about how I'm gonna use what's left of them. I'm hoping to try a new physical challenge in 2023, like Ragbrai or some sort of obstacle endurance event like a mud run.

Other hobbies that I enjoy include playing the guitar, visiting all the breweries in the state, learning how to solder, listening to new music, watching TV with my wife, playing Retro Bowl for iOS, reading through my Instapaper queue, checking out various tech networking events and meetups, and podcasting.

colophon

Here are the tools I used to build this site:

  • Ruby on Rails
  • Visual Studio Code
  • Linode
  • Transmit
  • 2022 Macbook Pro

My goal with this design was to make things as sustainable and fast as possible. In that spirit, I just wrote everything with HTML and CSS. The only Javascript on this site is a little XHR request to show my most recently listened song on Last.fm.