I’m a small-town Ohio kid who joined the Navy’s nuclear program at 18 and spent my early life running nuclear reactors on submarines. That mostly taught me that if something can go wrong it will, so you build things that hold up without someone hovering over them.

I spent the next 30 years in corporate learning and development, putting that same systematic streak to work helping organizations make work make more sense. I’m retired now.

My Pops repaired antique furniture. He was really good at it. He was forced into it after being medically forced out of his career as a long-haul truck driver. Now, I’m doing a digital version of the same thing: I build small, simple tools that help people with specific problems, because I find it satisfying. Right now the main one I’m tinkering with is TrackMySymptoms – a tool to help people log health symptoms over time in a way that’s actually usable.

A few things I believe, left over from the L&D years:

  • Clarity beats clever
  • If people can’t use it in real life, it’s not good design.
  • The problem is usually the design, rarely the person.
  • If it already works, don’t overengineer it.

That’s about it. I’m not looking for work. Now, I just build things that interest me.