About

I spent my 20s in internet culture — writing the first articles on Know Your Meme, researching viral content at BuzzFeed, managing editorial teams in New York. I understood early how the attention economy worked, which is part of why I eventually wanted to build something new instead. I retrained at NWTC in my 30s and have been on their web development team for nearly nine years.

Before software, I spent about six years in internet culture during the period when it was still figuring out what it was. I joined the Rocketboom team in 2008 and spent the next two and a half years writing the first several thousand articles in the Know Your Meme database — researching the origins, spread, and mutation of internet memes before most publications had a word for what we were doing. The site broke into the top 500 in US web traffic and was covered by Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR. I was eventually promoted to Community Manager and Head Writer of the video series we were producing.

From there I went to BuzzFeed as a Viral Media Researcher, studying what made content spread — the mechanics of sharing, the emotional triggers, the patterns underneath the noise. My findings ended up referenced by CNN, PC Magazine, and the official Twitter blog. I spoke on panels at Wieden+Kennedy and Ketchum. After BuzzFeed I ran editorial at My Damn Channel's Modern Primate, managed a team of contributors, and later did social content strategy consulting, including work with What's Trending.

I understood that space well. That was part of why I left it.

I'm an Application Developer at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, where I've worked for nearly nine years across a deliberate progression: writing coach, C# coach, IT coach, adjunct faculty, associate developer, then developer. Currently I'm on the web team in enterprise applications — building and maintaining integrations between our ERP, CRM, and LMS in C# and Apex. I also maintain the public website, built in Kentico Xperience. Earlier in my time at NWTC I migrated the college from SharePoint On-Prem 2013 to SharePoint Online, restructuring 500+ subsites into a flat architecture in the process. The work I do now is different, but the mission is the same — I'm building tools for a technical college, for students trying to improve their lives, and I care about getting that experience right.

I make electronic music under the name Disaster Preparedness Club. The setup is all hardware — a Squarp Pyramid sequencer driving a Korg MS-20, a Yamaha CS01-II, a pair of Korg Volcas, a Behringer TD-3, and a Sequential Circuits Drumtraks from 1984 through a rack of effects. No DAW, no laptop on stage, no subscriptions. Everything happens in real time on the machines. The gear from 1984 works the same way it did in 1984.

The music sits somewhere between darkwave, 1980s horror and sci-fi film scores, EBM, and post-industrial electronic forms. Tension, restraint, and physical presence over excess or spectacle. Themes of anxiety and impending collapse run throughout — but the record resists stagnation. Defiance and moments of fragile hope push against the weight. The debut EP, Music for a Crisis, was released January 2, 2026. The name is accurate.

The approach is: use what's available, repurpose what others threw away, build what you can't buy, and don't wait for permission or a budget. The Nature Oracle is a gutted 1970s Hanimex slide viewer with a Raspberry Pi Zero and a small LCD where the film slide used to go — it pulls climate data, asteroid near-approaches, and solar weather from NASA and other APIs and displays them in orange ASCII on a black screen. The CyGar is a cyberdeck built into an actual cigar box — Raspberry Pi inside, orange mechanical keyboard bolted to the lid, dual screens, hazard tape on the hinges. It runs a full Linux desktop. The aesthetic is part of the point.

Both projects started as constraints. Keeping things out the landfill is something that always sounds like a good idea.

For years the arrangement was: free storage in exchange for your data — Google Drive, iCloud, Facebook, OneDrive, all of it indexed and mined by someone else. At some point that tradeoff stopped feeling acceptable. I migrated everything off those platforms onto a self-hosted Nextcloud instance running on a Raspberry Pi 5, with local backups on a second drive. Home Assistant runs on a salvaged Pi 3B. Pi-hole handles DNS filtering for the whole network. None of it called home when I set it up, and none of it does now.

The maintenance is real and I won't pretend otherwise. But the infrastructure is mine, and that matters.