I am a self-taught* web developer who has been working professionally in the field since early 2018. The bulk of my work so far has been 1) Developing a Web UI (in Angular) for TrueNAS, the open-source storage and networking product, and 2) Building web apps (in Vue and Laravel, using AWS) that citizens use to access local government services. See my full resume (pdf) here.

This website is intended as a brief introduction to me and as an exercise in using the simpliest web development tools (HTML, CSS and Javascript) with no frameworks.

I was a minister for many years. These days, I think that the greatest virtues are things like Rationality, Discipline, Compassion, and Respect. I have also been influenced by the writings of the Stoics, and by their four main virtues, Courage, Temperance, Justice, and Wisdom.

I went into the ministry out of a desire to stand up for truth, and to discover more of it. I was probably more successful with the second than the first. In my search for more truth, I discovered the wonderful Seth Godin, who often writes about marketing, but sometimes touches on why we believe things, and how beliefs (regardless of their veracity) tie us to others and give us meaning. This is what he does in Dancing With Belief, A Paradox of Community, Belief and Reality, and Belief and Knowledge. Seth Godin writes (in a way I wish I could) that our most firmly-held beliefs are about many things other than the actual state of reality.

In my ongoing struggle toward virtue, my frequent companion and antagonist has been anger. Somewhere I heard Seth Godin (again) say that "You are almost never right to be angry," but I have lost the source. But Ryan Holiday writes about a similar idea in Anger is a Kind of Madness.

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* Who is really “self-taught” though, in a world so rich in free and low-cost technical education online, not to mention the generosity of developers willing to share their own solutions to almost any problem?!