About

I grew up in rural Texas with horses, goats, and chickens. My family built the home we lived in during my high school years, from scratch, ourselves. Somewhere in the middle of that I got my first computer: a 486dx33 that could be overclocked to 66mhz with the press of a button.

I started publishing DOS games and composing tracker music in high school under the name Zaskoda Soft, a name borrowed from my great-grandmother's maiden name. My first weekly Web updates went online in August 1996, before anyone called that blogging. I've been building on the Internet ever since: game studio web platforms, communities with hundreds of thousands of members, robots, blockchain games, art installations, and a 12-year van build.

High-tech and natural. Digital and handmade. I've lived both ends of it: decades writing software in Seattle, and now writing code from Mexico.

BS in Computer Science from the University of North Texas, with a minor in English and Technical Writing. President's List, Dean's List, ACM member, and game development coursework in Ian Parberry's LARC lab.

MS in Information and Communication Technology for Development from the University of Colorado Boulder's ATLAS Institute, 3.97 GPA. ICTD is an interdisciplinary program about how technology serves communities. Mine was the practical kind: field tools for Re:Vision, a Denver nonprofit addressing the urban food desert problem, where I deployed offline data collection and trained local women on the platform in two languages. A social entrepreneurship case study with Prospera, a Guadalajara nonprofit helping women become micro-entrepreneurs. And a practicum with the Burning Man Project's technology team during its transition to a nonprofit. I also built and benchmarked a mesh network for last-mile connectivity and mined large-scale Twitter data from the Colorado floods.

Decentralist, philosophically and technically. I believe ownership of the Internet should be distributed, and I've been advocating for federated identity and open social systems since 2005. I'm skeptical of centralized tech power and wrote publicly about leaving Facebook in 2019, then built my own federated address book because the software I wanted didn't exist.

Egalitarian. Politically independent. I value authenticity over polish, in writing and in behavior, and I try to stay self-aware about my own contradictions.

Fire poi performer. Granted festival artist. Occasional amateur actor. HAM radio technician, callsign KI7APH. I served as president of Apogaea, Colorado's regional Burning Man event, during its most successful year, and built the Temple of Moon there in 2011.

I've documented 24 snowboarding trips, surfed, dived, and ridden downhill mountain bikes. These days I'm living in Mexico, a long way from Silicon Valley and arguably a return to my rural roots in a different form.