Hello

I’ve been having a lot of fun chasing ideas lately. Following them wherever they go, mostly for their own sake — and I wanted somewhere to put them down. That’s all this is.

What I’d really like is to hear what you think. If something here is wrong, or interesting, or you’ve already solved a version of it, I want to know. The best parts of building in the open have been the conversations that came out of it, and I’d happily have more of them.

A bit about me

I’m a mutt.

I started in electrical engineering, doing IoT and embedded work inside an innovation incubator. The kind of place where you get handed a problem and a bench and are expected to come back with something that works. After that I spent time in a more structured software environment doing full stack, which taught me the parts I’d been cheerfully ignoring: tests, review, what a thing costs to keep alive after you’ve shipped it.

Now I use all of it at once, and that turns out to be the point. The projects I like best are the ones that need every bit of it; a board, a protocol, and a browser, all in the same afternoon.

The rest of it

I have a deep love for retro gaming, and I find repairing old consoles genuinely cathartic. There’s a specific pleasure in a machine from 1999 that somebody gave up on, an hour with a soldering iron, and then it works again. Not much else pays out that cleanly.

I also play a lot of Magic with friends, which is why Divining Top exists. Magic initially drew me in with its deck building and its near-infinite exploration when doing so. I feel like modern tools have lost that sense of exploration. Crowdsourced is amazing, but it also leads to very homogeneous builds.

Pulsar is the same story in different clothes. I wanted to use a Dreamcast controller without the cable. I wanted to try out a chip I’d used in a previous project. Nothing really existed when I started!

Say hello

If any of this is interesting, or you want to argue with it, or you’re working on something adjacent, please reach out! I’ve had a blast collaborating with different communities, and I’m always up for more of it.

More soon, once I work out what’s worth writing down.