About Me

How It All Started

Back in '98, I was a high school kid slamming out HTML in all caps because that's just how the internet shouted back then. It was raw, chaotic, and I was hooked. I didn't have a roadmap—just a dial-up modem that screamed like a banshee and a curiosity I couldn't shake. My first sites were glorious disasters: nested tables, neon fonts, and more<blink> tags than should ever be legal. CSS was barely a rumor.

Band Life & Flash Glory

Things got serious when my band needed a website. We couldn't afford a designer, so I became one—sort of. Enter Flash. I went full throttle: animated intros, glowing buttons, a music player that autoplayed one of our tracks (because subtlety wasn't really the vibe). It felt like digital wizardry, and I was obsessed with every pixel of it.

That love for layout and detail naturally spilled into our MySpace page, where I spent way too many late nights wrangling CSS and hacking markup just to stand out. I didn't realize it then, but all that tinkering was quietly setting me up for my first tech job.

From Pixel Pusher to Real Dev

I started professionally as a UI/UX engineer, but my heart was always in the backend—the mystery, the logic, the power behind the curtain. PHP and MySQL were my first real tools for dynamic web apps. I learned a lot... and broke a lot. (Sorry, past me. Should've sanitized that input.)

Then Ruby on Rails came along and blew my mind. It was clean. It was expressive. It made web dev feel like art. That was the real turning point.

The Elixir Awakening

About a decade ago, I fell into Erlang and Elixir. It started with building XMPP chat systems and spiraled from there. Suddenly, I was writing code that felt like music—concurrent, elegant, and shockingly robust. Elixir hit all the right notes. I've been lucky to build with it ever since, shipping systems that feel fast, resilient, and joyful to work on.

And the community? Sharp, humble, and curious. My kind of people.

Giving Back

One of the most rewarding parts of this journey has been giving back to open source. I was part of the early Phoenix Framework crew, helping shape it when it was still finding its voice. These days, I help maintain Rustler—a library that bridges Rust and Erlang, giving you the power of systems programming with the joy of functional concurrency. It's niche, but it's a blast.

Sharing the Ride

I've had the chance to speak at conferences around the world, jamming on topics like Elixir, Rust, distributed systems, and making code that survives real-world chaos. It's not about being the expert—it's about swapping war stories with other nerds and getting hyped about clever hacks and hard-won lessons.

Just Getting Started

I'm still deep in it—writing code, chasing weird bugs, spinning up ideas, and seeing where they take me. The web's changed a lot since the days of clunky HTML and screaming modems, but that spark? It's still there. If anything, it's burning hotter. There's always some new tool to learn, some better way to do things, some problem begging for a clean, clever solution.