The Early Years
I grew up in the outer Richmond District of San Francisco, and began coding on an Apple II at the age of 9. Over the next few years, I taught myself to program in Integer BASIC, and learned enough Applesoft to design lo-res kaleidoscopes. I even wrote a program that generated and printed Dungeons & Dragons character sheets with randomly generated stats. But honestly, I spent most of my time on the computer playing games like Ultima, Wizardry, and Castle Wolfenstein, and the 6-double-sided-floppy-disc epic Time Zone.
Early Education
When I was 13, I studied GraFORTH and the 6502 assembly programming language for nearly a year with a college group taught by Gilman Louie, who was kind enough to let me join these weekly classes taught in the living room of his house. I started getting involved in designing some of the logic for penalties in a football video game, but then—for reasons that are too complicated to elaborate upon here—I ended up moving to live with my Aunt Claire and her family in rural Oregon … without a computer. She bought a piano soon thereafter, and that became my new keyboard of choice.
College Education
Rather than study computer programming, I decided to pursue a degree in music. Looking back, I can’t fathom why I didn’t at least get a minor in computer programming. Perhaps it was the draw of music and the incredible amount of time I had to spend practicing and rehearsing; there was no time for anything else.
It took me nearly six years to finish my bachelor’s degree. My classmates joked that I should apply for tenure.
- 1994 Bachelor of Arts in Music, Western Oregon University
I taught English in Tokyo after graduating from college, but came back home after 4 months in order to go back to college.
- 1994 – 1995 Post-baccalaureate studies in Spanish and Japanese, Oregon State University
- 1995 Certificate of Completion, Waseda/Oregon Summer Program, Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Oregon
1995 to 2010
My father passed away in 1995, and I had to move back to San Francisco to settle his estate. This short-circuited my sense of purpose and direction for several years. Rather than return to college, I played in several bands, moved from Portland to San Francisco and back a few times, and traveled abroad whenever I could afford to. I worked as a server, barista, assistant scuba diving instructor, pizza delivery driver, whatever I could do to just live in the moment.
From 2002 to 2003, I lived in Isla Mujeres, Mexico and worked as a youth hostel receptionist. I became proficient with Photoshop and Excel, and began to learn Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).
When I returned to the states after that stint, I accidentally became a restaurateur. It started small. A record store owner sold me a cafe adjacent to his business, and it grew so popular over the next two years that it became evident we needed a bigger space.
In 2005, I sold the house I grew up in, paid off my mortgage and other debts, and used the remaining money to build a restaurant.
Don’t ever do that.
I got lucky. 4 out of 5 of you will not, and even if you do succeed, most of you will learn what they mean when they say, “The quickest way to make a small fortune in the restaurant business is to start with a large one.”
I managed the business, did most of the maintenance work, a little prep work, and a lot of dishwashing. I used VBA to turn an Excel workbook into a punch clock / weekly timesheet generator / stock management system. (It was a little bit like building a school bus on the chassis of a Volkswagen Beetle, but it worked for nearly a decade until there was dependable and affordable software to replace it.)
I left hiring, food purchasing, and menu pricing to my business partner/chef. The cost of goods and payroll were through the roof, so in order to avoid going bankrupt, something had to change.
I’m not a chef, so …
In 2006, I let go of my original chef/business partner and hired a talented, young chef named Gabriel Rucker who whipped the place into shape. We earned “Restaurant of the Year” in the Oregonian and a front page spot in the New York Times dining section in 2007. And, we finally started making a profit.
I’d rather be coding, so …
That same year, we hired an knowledgable manager/sommelier, Andrew Fortgang, and this allowed me to step away and focus more time on the restaurant’s website and coding in general. I took several online courses and became fairly proficient in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP — now I could do the updates we needed right away without having to turn to the original designers for assistance.
2011 – present
After we opened a second restaurant, Little Bird, I decided to become a silent partner and focus more on web development and piano instruction. I moved to Astoria, Oregon in 2012 to live with my partner Jesse. The following year I began teaching piano at the Astoria Conservatory of Music and working as an accompanist. In my spare time, I took countless intermediate and advanced courses in everything necessary to become a full-stack developer. By 2015 I was freelancing as a web developer/designer.
These days I build or revamp websites mostly for artists, small businesses, and non-profits. Check out my web portfolio for some examples.
Today, in addition to freelance web design and maintenance, I teach piano and guitar, work as an accompanist for the North Coast Chorale, and manage a co-working space called Open Office in Astoria, Oregon.