Logic and Pixels
As a life-long nerd, I've been making stuff with logic and pixels since the dawn of the personal computer revolution. I've worked on everything from whimsical games and digital pop-up books for kids to enterprise-level web applications. Throughout my career, I have lived on the boundary between the creative and the technical, and that love of craft started early on for me.
Lights, Camera, Action
As a teenager with zero acting or screenwriting experience, I finagled my way onto a local by-kids-for-kids television show called Beyond Our Control, a Junior Achievement project. The experience sparked a love of video production and working with creative teams, and I spent my college years and a further two decades studying and practicing the fine and fiddly arts of post production: editorial, graphics and VFX.
Fun and Games
Remember Flash? I sure do. Before the advent of pocket computers, Flash was just about the most fun toy any overgrown kid could ask for. Branching out from multimedia work for clients, I began making games and managed to sell a few of them to sites like Miniclip. I put together a LAMP-stack site just to house them, and a few years later I had a library of around 30 games. Check out the Arcade Archive to play through some of the classics.
After expanding into Objective-C for iOS project, I worked with illustrators and writers to craft a series of kids' pop-up books and games for publishers like Random House and Highlights for Children.
A Nerdy Journey
After working at my first job out of college for more than 20 years, I decided to move into data driven advertising and ran the digital half of an agency devoted to home services companies. Afterward, I worked at a creative agency in downtown Indianapolis with an amazing design team and overhauled their web development process to allow their designers to let their ideas run free. The result was a series of gorgeous sites based on visual motifs most folks didn't think was possible on the web.
I then dove headlong into web application work, first with PHP frameworks like Laravel and then into React. Shortly afterward, I started working with micro-frontends then jumped into NextJS and Typescript. It's been an amazing journey.
On My Honor
I have been involved in Scouting in one way or another for most of my life. I earned my Eagle in 1984 and 35 years later my son earned his. I served as Scoutmaster of his Troop for several years and still pitch in as a ASM and life-to-eagle coordinator. Additionally, I served a term as District Commissioner for Fall Creek, two relatively uneventful years if you don't count the managerial tightrope act of merging two established districts and, I almost forgot, a global pandemic. Through Scouting, I've learned a great deal about myself and the importance of serving through leadership.
