Here's where I'm coming from...
I've been building for as long as I can remember. Most of the things I've ever built have faded from memory. What little success I've had so far stands on the back of seemingly endless failures. People who meet me today only see the technical skill and the business acumen. They don't see the years of stupid mistakes and wasted potential.
When I was about 6 years old, I started building my first sites on Blogger and then basic HTML and CSS. When I saw The Social Network at 13 years old, I believed that I could build anything.
Unfortunately, I was 13 and life began to get difficult at home. As a nerdy kid, I became more concerned with social acceptance than software. Instead of honing my craft, I wasted my teenage years chasing social acceptance—a losing game.
My path was not that of the Ivy League savant who would beeline from Harvard to Facebook. By 19, I had dropped out of college to pursue music, not because I loved it, but because I wanted the illusion of significance.
Finally, I learned to trade the entitlement of tomorrow for the discipline of today. In just the past few years of relentless work, I have begun to take back the lost time:
- Closed 8-figures worth of tech contracts
- Learned more technologies than I thought possible
- Built amazing software with all kinds of amazing people
This is what inspires my work today:
- Building technology that contributes to a prosperous, liberal society
- Working with communities to solve real problems and create real impact
- Building software that is meaningful to people and for people
When I first started, I was in it for the thrill—the rush of making something that worked, that people could see, click, touch. But over time, I've come to realize that building software isn’t just a technical act. It’s a spiritual one. Software is a way of encoding our values, our beliefs, our hopes. And like all things worth doing, it should be done with care.
We live in a world dominated by short-term thinking. The Internet has become a place of frantic swiping, infinite scrolls, and empty metrics. We've traded the rich wisdom of Buddhist impermanence for the anxiety of what’s next. But software can be different. It can be an anchor to the moment—a tool for focus, clarity, and meaningful work.
Art is our visceral human aspiration to reach beyond the physical world into a spiritual reality. At our most creative moments, we tap into it. But, as with any art, to build great software is a struggle with the ego. I have found in my creative process, that faith is the antidote.
Because we all live 24/7 in our own heads—especially if we are creative types—the natural state of human perception is to be at the center of the universe. Faith is a contextual force. It is the wonderful experience of believing God is by my side as I build. It is also the ego death that exposes our mistakes with vulnerability and accountability. It teaches each of us that we are both in the image of Christ and need to work at ourselves daily to not become Judas.
I believe great software brings us back to ourselves. It reminds us what matters. It serves real needs, solves real problems, and helps real people. But most important of all, it is the way we build communities. Do we build with soul or with apathy? That is the human inside the engineer.
This is where I’m coming from. This is why I build.