About

I spent years studying how attention and information spread online — writing the first articles on Know Your Meme, researching the mechanics of virality at BuzzFeed, managing editorial teams in New York. I understood from the inside how that system worked and what it was optimized for. That understanding is the frame for everything I've explored and everything I've built since: infrastructure you control, tools that don't surveil you, environments where learning happens on your terms. I retrained at NWTC in my 30s and have worked there for nearly nine year, the last seven specifically on the web team.

Before software, I spent about six years in Internet Culture during the period when Internet Culture 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.

Retraining in my 30s was a specific choice. I chose a technical college — as student first, eventually as developer — because NWTC is an institution built to widen access, not sort people. I've been an Application Developer there 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 institutional systems in C# and performing platform administrative duties. I also maintain the public-facing website. Earlier in my time at NWTC I led a large intranet migration, restructuring hundreds of subsites into a flat architecture in the process. The software I care about building is legible and honest — it serves the person using it rather than the institution deploying it. Building it for students who are navigating financial aid and registration while working full-time means that calculus is never abstract.

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 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, 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.

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

The work I want to do sits at the intersection of information integrity, open infrastructure, and education as access. I've seen the inner workings of these systems and seen how they operate and how they fail — years studying how attention systems optimize against their users, nearly a decade building software for students who can't afford for it to be frustrating, and a home network I run myself because the alternative stopped being acceptable. That combination of positions is specific, and it shapes what I think is worth building: tools that put users in control of their own data, institutions that use technology to widen access rather than extract it, and systems designed to be understood by the people depending on them. If you're working in that space, I'm interested in the conversation.