Hacker / Maker Community
I have been part of the hacker and maker community for decades, although my interest in making things goes back much further than the communities themselves. As a child, I spent time in my father's garage, where I was allowed to use his tools as long as I learned to use them safely and put everything away when I was finished. "The job is not finished until the tools are put away," he used to say. I took things apart, broke things, and experimented. Over the years, I gradually learned how to put things back together and fix them.
I was also experimenting with computers from an early age. In the 1980s, my brother and I created a BBS, and I would mess around with the code of video games. I created an animation for a grade-school project. Long before I had a name for it, I was drawn to figuring out how things worked and changing them to see what would happen.
I eventually got somewhat sidetracked into the internet. I began my career as a graphic designer and web developer, and also taught web development. The internet was easier to get access to and provided an immediate way to build things that other people could see. But I continued to miss working with physical things. I explored that side of things by working at motorcycle shops and eventually found a community that brought technology and hands-on making together.
I attended the first Maker Faire in San Mateo, California, in 2006. It made a strong impression on me, and I wrote an article about it for a motorcycle magazine I was working with at the time. The maker movement gave me a name and a community for something I had been interested in for much longer. I eventually found hackerspaces, and fell in love with them.
My home hackerspace is Noisebridge in San Francisco, the first hackerspace I ever visited. I have traveled across four continents visiting hackerspaces and have spent significant amounts of time participating in hacker communities in places including The US, China, Japan, The Netherlands, and Germany. I made a pilgrimage to Berlin to visit c-base, the first hackerspace.
I am on the board of TroubleMaker hackerspace in Shenzhen. I also traveled extensively in China as part of the Hacker Trip To China, or HTTC. Those trips stopped in 2019. I made several attempts to revive HTTC afterward, but none took hold. I also attempted to organize a tour of hackerspaces in the American South. No one came, so I took a shorter trip on my own and visited hackerspaces along the way.
I have competed in more than 20 hackathons and won 11 prizes. I have also volunteered at hackathons, helping create the kind of environment where people can learn, build, and experiment. Learning and teaching are important parts of the hacker ethos for me. I have met many brilliant people through these communities, and that may be one of the things I value most about them. I like to say that if I am the smartest person in the room, I am in the wrong room. Hackerspaces help make sure I am in the right room.
Today, I am an entrepreneur who works with talented engineers and continues to tinker. I am on the board of a hackerspace, and I am rebooting YLEM: Artists Using Science and Technology, where I started as a graphic designer in 1999 and eventually became president. YLEM was originally an arts and technology organization, and the reboot expands that focus to include hackers and makers.
This page will be where I collect some of the projects, communities, and experiments that have grown out of that history.