About This Place

I wrote my first real program in 1986 on an Apple IIc. A dungeon crawler with a sprite editor I had to build myself because nothing existed for what I wanted. I was five.

I've slung cable, repaired printers, administered SCO Unix, survived Dolphin and early Wordpress, directed IT for a casino in Oklahoma, managed QA under a mentor who taught me that soft skills are the hard ones, and planted seeds at Surge then watched Catalyte poison the soil.

I got laid off once because a New York lawsuit against tribal banking operations collapsed the payday loan affiliate market and cut our revenue by 95%. Nobody plans for that. But you learn what institutional knowledge looks like when it evaporates overnight.

Somewhere in there I gave myself permission to suck at writing and a book fell out. Soil Beneath the Code is about engineering teams that consume their people and can't figure out why everything is always on fire.

Now AI is stripping the practical work away from development and all that's left is the intent; what should exist and why. I didn't pivot to philosophy. The industry pivoted around me and I was already standing there. I was always a philosopher of software; I just didn't know it.

I write about two things here. How teams lose their best thinking; that's the Polyculture work. And how to keep the reasoning alive after the people change; that's Intent-to-Artifact. I'm building a platform called Kith around the second problem.

We've always been philosophers of software. We just didn't know it.