About

Welcome to my creative space, where photography, coding, and other interests converge. I have been writing code, taking photos, doodling, writing poetry, and making music for decades. BTW, writing code was the most lucrative thing for me, so that is how I pay my rent. I still do all the other stuff, but primarily for fun and some extra change here and there.

Folks think, how can somebody who is good at and enjoys writing code also have the same interests in artistic endeavors? IMHO, coding and art use the same parts of your brain. They scratch the same itch. They are both the same thing. You can create something brand new from nothing. You can use existing patterns and practices to perfect that ability. To me, art and code are the same.

Making the Photos

I have been taking pictures since I was a kid. I got a 110 Instamatic pocket camera, the one that used a flash cube with flash bulbs that exploded every time you took a picture. In high school, I borrowed my mom's Minolta SLR and took classes to learn B&W and Color film development and printing. As an adult, I worked briefly as an Assistant Manager at a One Hour Photo Shop. Then digital photography emerged, and I worked at a start-up that attempted (and ultimately failed) to bridge the gap between digital cameras and physical photo printing.

I enjoy taking pictures of just about anything, from snapshots of stairs where the light creates interesting shapes and lines, to carefully composed portraits, to landscapes, architecture, and even street photography.

Making the Codes

I started writing code as soon as it became publicly accessible. In the early 80s, as personal computers became available, I would try to get my hands on anything I could figure out and make it do what I wanted whether that was going to Summer Computer Camp at Ohio State, or going over to a friend's house that had a computer, or begging my parents to get me my own. Eventually, they broke down and got me a Commodore 64. Within a couple of months, with some friends, we began writing our very own computer games, with dreams of starting our own software company.

Now, with a reasonably long career, I have done most of the things there are to do as a software engineer. From front-end UI/UX design and development to racking servers in data centers and everything in between, I have lately settled on Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Data Engineering, and building backend systems that are scalable, resilient, and easy to manage and extend (AKA they don't suck).

Also, I built this site using an AI Agent for complete transparency. I wanted to see if I could do it in a way that (A) had a good outcome, (B) I didn't end up rolling my eyes at the bad decisions of an LLM, and (C) I was having fun...
...I did.