Start Here
What this blog is, who I am, and why none of it fits a single niche — which is exactly the point.
I did not think I was going to start a blog. I had a note on my phone called Posts with nineteen entries in it, the oldest from 2021, a running list I kept telling myself I would eventually write. I had a newsletter I set up and never sent. I kept forming opinions I wanted to say somewhere specific, and I never had a clean place to say them. So here we are.
I work in public policy at Cologix, a colocation data center company. That means I spend my weeks thinking about infrastructure, about how the physical layer of the internet actually gets built, permitted, powered, and connected to the communities it lands in. Data centers are everywhere in the news right now, and most of the coverage gets it wrong in ways that matter. I have been on the inside of that industry long enough to have a real point of view on it, and this is one of the places I plan to use it. The views here are my own and not my employer's.
But that is only part of what this is.
On nights and weekends I build iOS apps. I have shipped a few: a daily photography scavenger hunt called ShotList, a couple of others that have found small audiences, a college football app I am quietly proud of, and an HOA portal I am building now mostly out of spite at how bad the existing options are. I have always been able to code, but I am not a UI designer and I am not a marketer, and for years those gaps were where good ideas went to die. That changed when I started working with AI as a real creative partner rather than a novelty. The projects that sat at ninety percent for years are finished now. The gaps I used to work around are not gaps anymore. There is a lot I want to write about that shift: what it actually feels like from the inside, what it does and does not change, and what I think it means for the broader category of software people pay for every month.
I am also, depending on the day, a photographer, an obsessive about camera gear and lenses, someone who has spent more time than is probably healthy thinking about luggage and travel bags, a person who cooks because he loves it and not because he thinks anyone wants to watch, and a traveler who thinks about where he is going approximately twice as often as he actually goes. If you know me, you know the gear habit runs well past cameras. It is the robot vacuum and the robot mower that bought back my weekends, the smart home gear I have wired together until the house mostly runs itself, the audio equipment, and the everyday mobile tech I test constantly and mostly cannot leave alone.
None of that has an obvious center of gravity. It does not belong to a single niche or personal brand category. It is just the things I know about and care about, which is exactly what I want this blog to be: a place where I write about things I actually have something to say about, in whatever order they happen to seem worth saying.
A few things I am not going to do here. I am not going to optimize every post for search engines or write around a content strategy someone handed me. I am not going to pad things out or round the edges to avoid an argument. I have worked in policy long enough to know how to be credible, and I have been on the internet long enough to know how to be honest, and those two things are more compatible than they sometimes look.
What I am going to do is write about the data center industry when the coverage bothers me enough to respond to it, which is often. I am going to write about building software with AI because it is changing how I work in real ways and I have real things to say about it. I am going to write about cameras and bags and travel and cooking when I have something specific to share, which means when I actually have experience or an opinion worth your time, not because a calendar told me to.
Even this site runs on a backend I built rather than rented, which is fitting, because the first post on this blog is about why I stopped defaulting to subscriptions and started building things instead. It is the idea that kind of sparked all of this into motion, and it is a good place to start if you want to know how I think.
After that, I do not know exactly what order things will arrive in. But I know what they will be about, and I think the right people will find it interesting.
That is enough of an introduction.