Everything I’ve written so far in this biography series—the early tinkering, the security mindset, AuDHD-driven depth and breadth—leads to one practical question: How do I actually run projects so they ship cleanly, stay stable, and don’t turn into chaos? This is...

TL;DRMy AuDHD didn’t just shape what I learned—it shaped how I learned. I never came up through “programmer culture,” so I didn’t absorb the usual social shortcuts (leet-speak trivia, trendy stacks by default, pedigree signaling). Instead, I built capability the hard...

TL;DRAfter 9/11, my family’s move to Virginia and a stretch of homeschooling dropped me into long, unsupervised hours with a computer, dial-up internet, and a growing obsession with how software really works. Watching early “techno” films and hearing a family member...

TL;DRAfter I started tinkering with SkiFree in 1997, I kept learning the same lesson over and over: constraints don’t prevent good engineering—they create it. When you don’t have unlimited time, money, or tooling, you learn to value what actually scales: clear scope,...

TL;DRIn 1997, my family got our first computer—a Windows dinosaur with a little skiing game called SkiFree. At seven years old, I started pulling it apart with library books, trying to figure out what it was written in and how it worked. I pushed that machine past its...