I spent the first 20 years of my career breaking things. I am good at breaking stuff. I am a decent hacker, a semi-talented reverse engineer and a very curious deconstructionist. I yearn to tear things down, to tweak, to iterate, to improve and to use things in ways that were entirely unintended by their makers. As long as I can remember, I have loved these engagements.

I grew up in a print shop with my Dad, tearing down presses, opening and rebuilding motors and playing with type. I absorbed the power of making something on a printing press and the amplification that it represented at a visceral level. One of my earliest mentors, Bob Gent, furthered this enthrallment with print throughout high school, and even threw in my basic electronics education to boot! My Mom, another major icon in my life, was a computer professional. She was working in mainframe shops doing operations, quality control, management & some light development. She let me cut my teeth in the tape library & keypunch rooms. I later worked there after high school and during college as a tape librarian and eventually a printer technician/junior operator.

It was there, on that first corporate job, that a few people like Jim & Su Klun, Mike Davis, Diane DeFallo, Gary Shank, Art Smith and others taught me about coding, scripting, PCs, communications, EDI and how to be more than a technician. Art, in particular, taught me that it was great to be smart, but that you could take those skills and make a life, a business and some joy. I was an attentive student, even if it didn’t seem like it at the time. I was paying attention. And, because of their lessons, I made things – software/scripts, a BBS, business processes, a HUGE ego :), and I started businesses. I started generating ideas, working on them, chasing them, building them. I made myself happy by pursuing them, even the ones that crashed and burned. I learned that making is a form of hope. It’s a way to put forth something that represents your will to change the world, even if it is in some small way, (I supposed Aleister Crowley would be proud…).

Over the years, since then, I have made many businesses, products, written part of a book, been a published poet several times, created several groups for different purposes, made a symposium that ran for 5 years, written hundreds of articles for a magazine, taught myself to be a speaker and presented at conferences around the world, build processes and tools in use by thousands of people on a global scale. I have been and am – a maker. And I have loved every moment of it. I see making things – be it code, hardware or words, as a tribute to those mentors. I honor each of them with everything I do. I am a part of the reflection of the sum of their inputs. I make because that is exactly what they taught me to do…