About me

I’m interested in how we build a good life together: useful technology, practical skills, stronger local relationships, and ways of growing things that care for the land. I’m learning as I go—sometimes through things that work, sometimes through things that don’t. Thinking, making, and spending time outside all belong to that same exploration.

I regularly attend 1 Million Cups in Grants Pass on Wednesday mornings. I enjoy meeting people with common interests, or people whose work opens up something I haven’t thought about. Here’s what’s on my mind now.

Learning to navigate

I was born and raised in Southern Oregon with Optic Nerve Hypoplasia, a condition that affects my vision and my ability to recognize people and objects by sight. From around age three through eighteen, the Program for the Visually Impaired gave me orientation and mobility training. I learned to travel with a cane and monocular, read unfamiliar environments, ask for what I needed, and move independently through the world.

My vision teacher Craig worked with me from early childhood nearly through high school. Very few students get someone so consistent in their corner. He deserves a unique thank-you, along with my teachers at Griffin Creek, Ms. Healy in seventh-grade science, my teachers at North Medford, and everyone else who treated independence as something I could learn rather than something vision loss had taken away.

From accessibility tool to laboratory

The BrailleNote was supposed to help with school. I treated it like a laboratory. I filled its memory by doubling copied text, experimented with Bluetooth pairing, memorized its speech menus, and once changed a teacher’s name in the synthesizer to “goofball.” In 2013, an iPad with VoiceOver and Zoom replaced a specialized device costing thousands of dollars. That shift showed me what happens when accessibility becomes part of mainstream design.

By my teenage years I was writing games, learning web development, and building cryptographic software. During my senior year I independently took the bus from North Medford High School to Rogue Community College’s Table Rock Campus for computer-science courses. The cane, monocular, bus training, and code all belonged to the same lesson: constraints are real, but they do not get the final word.

Building toward user ownership

My early projects moved from games to private communication, then payments, wallets, and application infrastructure. In 2020 I formed Peer-to-peer Privacy Systems Research LLC, the company known publicly as Project Babbage. As its Founding President, I have worked with a growing team of friends and builders on open interfaces for identity, payments, permissions, storage, and applications that answer to users.

My work matters deeply to me, but it is not the whole person. Family, faith, piano, nature, difficult questions, and Southern Oregon all keep me grounded. A piece of me will always be here.