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About Me

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I’ve got many different interests, and projects, and this page is very much a work-in-progress1.

First, I live in Golden, Colorado. I’m trying to get friends and family to agree to try to move here, or at least to plan on visiting regularly.

Golden is massively under-appreciated, and is a place full of potential, arguably more potential than nearly any other place in the USA2.

Software development #

I’ve had an eclectic life, as I think is pretty common. I’m pretty good at solving some kinds of problems, with certain kinds of “software-enabled” solutions. My Linkedin says “Software Developer”, and something about Ruby and Rails.3

I’ve got a bit of an obsession with knowledge transfer and learning and education and skills development and practical problem solving, and usually express this obsession in ways that relate to software development and technical sophistication. (and in rock climbing, but that’s a different story.)

I’ve not written much in the last two years on this website, but for a possible starting point, here’s some of my writing tagged rails.

I’ve also written about the Turing school and resources for being well-prepared for learning software development. here’s some of my writing tagged turing

Finally, I’m rounding up “Ruby/Rails educational skills-development stuff” at intermediateruby.com.

Podcasts and talks #

Climbing #

Many of the most significant experiences of my life have happened because of the sport of rock climbing, or within the rock climbing community (and all the adjacent implied communities).

I’ve had some lovely opportunities to climb all over the country and the world, with family and friends.

I climbed at, worked at, and lived a lot of my life at what was for a time the largest climbing gym in the USA (Rockville, Maryland) in a formative time of my life, between late teens and early 20s.

My approach to software development has always been informed by how I’ve approached rock climbing. I train hard, climb hard, and try hard. I’ve loved learning to move safely and confidently through “dynamic environments and situations”, and the skills/experiences I’ve had through my years of climbing informs much of the rest of my work.

👉 about climbing.

Golden, CO #

I really like Golden. I’ve lived in Golden for almost 10 years, and even ran for city council in 2017! 4

I ride my bike and scooter ALL over Golden and Denver. I give bike tours5

I’m surprisingly invested in Golden, in a way that surprises many people that I meet. It’s simply because I live here, I worked hard to live here, and I continue to work hard to make “here” a place worth living, and, critically, I want here to be a place my children (and their children) will be pleased to live in and grow up in, and hopefully plant their own roots in.

Current trends are running in the opposite direction than the above goals, so I’ve got my work cut out for me.

Trains & streetcars (1920 era) #

There used to be rail lines all over Golden, Lakewood, Denver, Clear Creek, Boulder, etc.

My most ambitious project yet is to bring streetcar networks (and ultimately rail travel) back to Golden.

In some ways it’s a hilariously easy project. The technology, while forgotten, was never that hard. Lay tracks, build some power lines over them, build streetcars, place streetcars on the tracks, drive them back and forth, letting people on and off.

As I work on this, my guiding principle is:

Streetcars must simultaneously be free to use/ride and must cover their own costs of installation, operation, and expansion #

The “How” of this was understood at an intuitive level in many different parts of society, I think. This section of the following video gets at how companies could use street-car-building, at any level of scale, to fund in a nice way, their own development:

You could imagine this analysis applied to a space of nearly any shape/size, in a “seeking to make the best use of resources” perspective, and this leading directly to improved profit-and-loss statements.6

The results of this thing, when it’s done right, are fractal.

On the flip side, look at the actual pictures:

They’re beautiful, and something you could imagine applying to land in a fractal way. This was a solved problem, more or less

Historically bootstrapped #

Historically, streetcar companies funded themselves. It’s a pretty simple revenue model, based on buying land before the streetcar line goes in, putting in the line, and then selling the land at much increased costs (especially the land adjacent to a new station) at multiples of what it was purchased at. The land value goes up because of the station.

Believe it or not, this is a very modest and obtainable goal. Also, most of America obviously wants to live in “traditional, walkable regions” and streetcars are how you make those areas at scale.

CoorsTek, Mines, and Coors would work together to extend the existing rail lines in Golden into the heart of the city (and School of Mines) so the students could have on-campus “labs” around streetcar operation just the same as they have on-campus “labs” for boring tunnels.

Mines would become first-in-the-world for a program like this, and the body of practical knowledge and professionalism developed at Coors would set the program up for great success. CoorsTek would provide a lot of practical problem-solving opportunity as their big project will soon be bringing lots and lots and lots of people, materials, and business to Golden.

For practical experience and evidence of competence, everyone involved in the rail/streetcar part of the program would work on building/operating streetcar lines in and around Golden.

Lines can be built in modular ways, so as the track is laid, trains can run up and down them safely.

RTD is an example of what not to do with rail, so don’t let your vision of a healthy rail network be influenced by the trashfire that is RTD.

There’s a few pieces I’m trying to line up, this is definitely a stretch goal, but it’s not nearly as strange as it might seem. Pardon the bevity (or lack thereof) of this section. I’ll pull it into it’s own page soon.

As Golden grows, it needs to bring back rail transport7. Streetcars and trains. There’s simply no other way to move reasonable numbers of people reasonable distances. Cars and roads interact like a very viscous fluid moving through small and bendy pipes.

Golden needs some upgrades to it’s mobility network, and if a few groups could get on the same page, some very interesting things will happen:

  • Coors (the brewery)
  • CoorsTek (the scientific porcalain manufacturing company)
  • School of Mines (top-notch, globally-famous engineering school)
  • City of Golden (the local municipal government whose approval is needed for nearly anything/everything)

How would they all work together?

Well, School of Mines would start a new undergrad program titled: Rail Mobility Networks, which will cover the planning, construction, operation, and expansion of city streetcar networks.

The classes would all be deeply practical, with a laser-like focus on building actual streetcar networks8 in Golden.

Coors, the brewery, has a big honkin’ rail network servicing its impressively large brewing operation. I imagine they have a few dozen employees (at least) who, combined, have hundreds of years of practical experience running/operating rail lines.

Across the street from Coors is CoorsTek, who’s about to spend a ton of money building a big HQ in downtown Golden. Coors and CoorsTek could provide some of the expertise and funds required to get this all up and running, partner with School of Mines to spread the knowledge (via graduates) to the rest of the world, and reap huge benefits of many kinds.

City of Golden would have land-use issues to iron out. (But wouldn’t the planning department love to work on growing the first streetcar network in America to be built in like 100 years?) The key to streetcars is they create easy accessibility for people who live/work along the rail line. As accessibility goes up, so does land value, and as land value goes up, that drafts behind it an “intensification of development”. I’m hoping to see beautiful development, like old-school Boston, New Orleans, Denver, etc. Beautiful, vernacular development that mixes quality and affordability and all that. City staff would have so much to contribute.

Power for streetcars #

Streetcars run on electricity, so any local power generation setup will work. There’s a lot more that could be said, but we’ll leave it at that for now.

For more on power generation, and many other things: Where’s my Flying Car, from Stripe Press

Misc #

If you’ve ever hung out with me in person, or spoken with me via Zoom, I’ve probably spoken in an emotive way about cities and recommended a book (or four). I spend a lot of brain cycles on mobility networks and what causes who to go where and how.

Cities, and the people who live in them, and interactions therein, are fascinating to me, in a fractal way.

I’ve spent time in many different cities (and not-cities) around the world9. I’ve slept on roofs, on the floors of busses, in tents and trains, air mattresses, sleeping bags, blankets, regular mattresses, couches, beds, hammocks, and everything else, and loved every minute of it.

I’ve spent a lot of time moving from one place to another. My wife and I spent almost two years doing the digital nomad thing (before covid, back before it was quite as common as now).

These days, my wife and I are LARPing as a normal ex-DINK tech “power couple”. We recently traded two incomes and a cheap apartment for one income and a way-overly-expensive (and old) house. We finally made a beautiful baby girl, and a gnarly back injury I got in 2020 is clearing up.

I have an email newsletter (a few, actually) that I have not yet figured out a good cadence for emailing/communicating with, but more than a few people have told me these emails are some of the most interesting emails they get:

Here’s a teaser of the kinds of things we will discuss in the newsletter:

Compare these two drawings about Charleston, SC:

subsidized and ugly

illegal but beautiful

Why might one of these be subsidized, and why might one be illegal? What are the first-order and second-order effects of such things?

Which would you like to be built across the street from you?

More critically, what are the second-order effects of fixing this broken dynamic?

Products, Guides, and Services #

Most of what I make is free to use. I would strongly prefer most of what I do to be as helpful and widely available at somewhere between “free” and “you make money while or because of interacting with it.”

That said, we live in a cold, capitalist society. I can kick it with accountants and sales teams, and I do legit stuff worth real money:10

Footnotes #

  1. I use footnotes for all sorts of reasons, and it’s generally consistent, jumping between the spot in the text where the footnote is located, and jumping to the full footnote itself. I’m oddly opinionated about them. ↩

  2. I wish I could easily give my sources for my claims. I think I could give my sources, but it would be best to know what counts as ‘good sources’, and ‘how long do we claim this to take’. We all have different standards for different kinds of information/situations. If you’re the kind of person who reads footnotes, great! You will find sources and such for my claims. If you’re the kind of person who reads books, you’ll be pleased. ↩

  3. There’s a lot of strange little sub-specialities in software development, and I sit at a strange word-cloud of them. Mostly I like to have an enjoyable time solving meaningful problems, without being bored or stressed. ↩

  4. I had just finished Turing, and decided to see what the experience of local politics was like. I’ll try nearly anything once. Here’s what I explained to people, when they asked why I (a then-27-year-old) was getting involved with something like politics:

    This is more interesting than sitting on my couch in my boxers all day playing Call of Duty.

    I was, as you may imagine, repeatedly chastised for my irreverence. (And late campaign finance reports. I spent more in late fees on my spending reports than I ever spent “campaigning”)

    I only got like 11% of the vote, and since most of the “campaign season” is also “prime climbing time at the RRG”, I wasn’t even around for most of the actual campaigning. ↩

  5. They’re not very official, but after the 3rd friend said “you should offer these for money”, I said “ok fine”, and now you can pay me! 🚲 tour of Golden with Josh ↩

  6. I’m very aware of the financial side of what I’m speaking of. Broadly, for very many groups, the answer is “more money”, or “less expense”, or “saved time”, all of which roll up to “our company/group does ‘better’ in GAAP-legible ways”. ↩

  7. Physical constraints about volumes of people and the space requirements of personal vehicles dictates that the auto-oriented/urban-renewal-focused infrastructure orientation is built on embarrassingly bad math, and ethnic cleansing. This is true for pretty much every city in the world, but I live in Golden, so I’m focusing here. As things get up and running in Golden (and that knowledge starts spreading to other cities) streetcar networks will spread once again to other cities, ushering in the myriad commensurate benefits. ↩

  8. Emphasis on the plural. Since obviously streetcar networks can be built in different cities, yet connected by non-streetcar networks (like train lines, airports, etc), it would be a reasonable starting design constraint to build different networks, and any streetcar curriculum worth it’s salt would be able to speak persuasively to how to allow riders to gracefully move between networks and travel modalities. ↩

  9. My wife and I spent a 18 months living out of backpacks internationally, doing the “digital nomad” thing, and since we’ve both worked fully remotely for a long time, we’ve had an opportunity to travel, slowly, while living in these different cities and countries. (or not in cities, for climbing trips). ↩

  10. I must apologize, this list is not current nor comprehensive, but I hope to nudge it along towards both. ↩

  11. If you know, you know. ↩