BASIC · ACOT · HyperCard · MIDI · PageMaker · Photoshop 1.0
The seeds were planted before the web.
I took BASIC in high school and encountered some Pascal, but Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow—ACOT—was where computing became a creative medium for me. From tenth through twelfth grade, I built HyperCard stacks and composed MIDI music instead of writing traditional reports. I made desktop-published layouts in Aldus PageMaker and scanned images into Photoshop 1.0. Those years planted seeds that would sprout much later: code, interaction, sound, image, and language could all belong to the same practice.
The Denisonian · Writing · HTML · Information architecture
The student newspaper led me onto the web.
In college, I learned HTML with my co-editor at The Denisonian—Denison University’s student-run newspaper and oldest student-run organization. Editorial work taught me to find the shape of an idea; building for the web added structure, navigation, and a new kind of audience. That combination led directly to my first job out of college, doing newspaper layout and serving as webmaster.
Flash · Rich media · Interaction design
Rich media made interaction feel like material.
Flash, interactive learning, and the expressive early web made timing, motion, sound, and response part of the work. Interfaces were not just pages to assemble. They were environments whose behavior could carry meaning and personality.
Frontend architecture · Product engineering · Accessibility
Frontend engineering made the ideas durable.
Moving deeper into product engineering added architecture, performance, accessibility, and the discipline of systems that have to survive real use. The challenge became preserving the quality of an experience while making it dependable, maintainable, and possible for a team to extend.
UX engineering · Prototyping · Emerging technology
UX engineering turned prototypes into questions.
At the boundary between design and engineering, a prototype can make an uncertain interaction concrete enough to examine. The point is not theater or premature polish. It is learning where the hard part really is, especially when the underlying technology is new.
Design systems · Documentation · Developer experience
Systems made individual judgment shareable.
Design systems, documentation, internal tools, and developer experience all ask a related question: how can good decisions become easier to repeat without flattening the differences that matter? This is where interface craft becomes organizational infrastructure.
Engineering leadership · Mentoring · Team systems
Leadership widened the interface.
The work is also the conditions around the work: ownership, feedback, standards, mentoring, hiring, and the relationships between disciplines. Engineering leadership means shaping those conditions so that more people can exercise strong judgment and make the product better together.
AI-assisted making · Computational music · Penelopus
Creative technology brings the threads back together.
AI-assisted making and computational experiments reconnect technical systems with play, sound, observation, and open-ended inquiry. Penelopus is where that exploratory practice can stay colorful, unfinished, and alive—while this site holds the professional narrative and selected evidence.