I grew up in the mountains of western North Carolina, in the kind of place where everyone knows everyone and nobody’s business stays private for long. I was adopted into that community — which is mostly a good story, but adoption comes with a particular brand of insecurity around belonging that takes a long time to work through, if you ever fully do. Appalachian through and through — the holler’s in my blood and I’m not a lick embarrassed about it.

Technology got its hooks in me around age five, which put me squarely in the path of every transition a millennial could stumble through. I came up on floppy disks and dial-up BBS boards, watched the internet show up over a 56.6k modem that usually delivered about 24k on a good day and was remarkable anyway. Lived through the browser wars, the slow death of physical media, and the moment when everyone’s pocket outpaced the desktop I’d been building for years. A friend up the mountain introduced me to web development and Linux while I was still in school — unusual interests for a rural kid out in the sticks of western NC — and that pointed a direction I’ve been at ever since. There’s something to be said for growing up through the transitions rather than arriving to their aftermath. You can’t scare me with a slow API.

I fell into a very conservative strain of Southern Baptist faith before entering high school — the kind of thing that happens when you’re depressed and don’t have a lot of confidence in yourself. I carry more regret and shame about that period than I’d care to admit. Old classmates I haven’t seen in twenty-five-plus years occasionally find their way back and aren’t sure what to do with the gap between who they remember and who showed up. That makes two of us. Came out the other end an atheist. I’m fully aware of the irony and I’ve made peace with most of it. I’ve been in therapy regularly since early in the pandemic — learned more about myself in those sessions than in the decades prior, including that some of what I’d been carrying has names: complex PTSD and anxiety. I manage.

I believe in taking care of your people, not letting corporations run roughshod over your community, and having the gumption to fix your own damn stuff — including being able to defend yourself and the people around you. That’s not abstract for me. Doing side work years ago I crossed paths with someone capable of serious violence — had no way of knowing it at the time, found out what they’d done the next day. Once you’ve been that close to something that violent, personal safety stops being theoretical. I’ve trained in Muay Thai for that reason among others. We protect us — and that includes the people most often left to fend for themselves. Women deserve every tool available to them for their own defense. Trans women are women. Not a complicated position. Right to repair isn’t a political position for me, it’s just common sense. Same with FOSS.

What I build: procedural music generation, local AI tooling, Linux packaging, game tools, and more infrastructure glue than I originally planned to maintain. Fifteen-plus years of it, and I still have a weakness for the unconventional approach — the stack that shouldn’t work, the tool built out of spite, the sideways solution. That tends to be where the interesting problems live. I spend most of my time with Rust, Python, Arch Linux, and a container setup that keeps growing against my better judgment. I run ROCm on AMD hardware because I have opinions about not renting compute I could just own. The projects aren’t side interests. They’re what I’m building toward.

Outside the keyboard: Eagle Scout, licensed ham radio operator (iCOM and Yaesu — the only correct answers), and a photographer who came to it later than I should have. High school had a video production class — a JVC camcorder on DV tape, an analog Casablanca standalone editor for the offline work, and eventually Premiere Pro on a Windows XP machine with a Matrox card pushing live video through the entire school system. One of the few times in my life I felt comfortable in front of a camera. Right next door sat a darkroom the school had converted to long-term storage. We read about film while the enlargers collected dust twenty feet away and never touched them. I finally picked up photography years later after moving to the city for my first real tech job — went digital like everyone else at the time, then eventually came back to film. Fuji Neopan and Kodak Tri-X, shot on Olympus and Fujifilm bodies. I’ve developed strong opinions about IPAs specifically over the years — the hoppier the better. Dropped thirty-plus pounds recently, which has had predictable effects on that particular hobby. There are other hobbies. More than is strictly defensible.

The blog is where the technical writing lives. The projects section covers what I’m building toward. The resume is for the professional context. And below you’ll find a few other pages worth poking around — including a lexicon of the mountain words that keep sneaking into my writing, because if I’m going to use them I might as well document them proper.