I make computers do things.

For as long as I can remember, I've wanted to know how the world worked.

When I was little, I loved taking things apart to see what made them tick. They rarely got put back together.

As I got older, I got better at taking things apart non-destructively. More of them went back together in one piece, and sometimes they would even still work afterward.

I could often see how things fit together in my head, and I spent a lot of time wondering why adults seemed determined to make things more complicated than they needed to be.

Eventually that curiosity turned toward electronics, and RadioShack became my favorite store. At fourteen, I passed the no-code Technician amateur radio license exam.

A couple of years later, we got our first computer.

Things escalated quickly.

I started doing computer consulting on the side when I was sixteen, alongside far too many years spent working retail.

Five of those years were at RadioShack, and it remains one of my favorite jobs I've ever had. People were constantly walking through the door with some new problem, strange device, broken cable, half-explained symptom, or technological puzzle for me to figure out.

Fast-forward a few years, and now I'm the network administrator for a smallish Michigan retailer.

I love the job.

In retrospect, it probably would have been useful to know that I was autistic and had ADHD before I entered the workforce.

But that's water under the bridge.

These days, I still approach technology pretty much the same way I did when I was a kid: poke at it, figure out how it works, take it apart if necessary, and see whether I can make it do something interesting.

I'm autistic, and I didn't figure that out until adulthood. Learning that gave me a much better framework for understanding how I experience the world, communicate, and process things.

I'm also part of the LGBTQIA+ community. It's an important part of my life and identity, even if most of what ends up on this site involves computers, radios, or some piece of hardware that probably should have been recycled twenty years ago.

Like a lot of people who discovered the web in the late 1990s, I built myself a personal page.

It had loud colors, too many tables, an "under construction" graphic, and was permanently under construction anyway, like a Michigan road.

And yes, I used the <blink> tag.

Eventually I discovered PHP and, more importantly, includes. Suddenly I didn't have to copy the same navigation and page furniture into every file by hand. That felt suspiciously close to magic at the time.

Years later, I inherited some very old PHP at work and ended up dragging a good chunk of it forward by roughly a decade. That included modernizing old code, cleaning up some fairly alarming practices, and fixing far more SQL injection vulnerabilities than anyone should be comfortable finding in one application.

These days I still understand HTML and PHP well enough to know what I want changed, but I have no particular desire to spend an evening manually rearranging tags when I can describe the change and let ChatGPT handle the tedious surgery.