Where I've been

First posted on LinkedIn, September 25, 2026.

Around 2008 a VC friend told me investors love founders who have had a first exit and are hungry for more. He meant it kindly. It landed as a question, and my answer was that I wanted to be home while my kids grew up. So that is what I did, for about fifteen years.

I never stopped building. A 3D-printer company. A decade of robotics and Robotic Operating System work. High precision RTK-GPS and computer vision systems. An open-source UV device a few of us designed during the mask shortage that a hospital system put into use. A game studio – Magecraft is on Steam. A writing system for my amazing wife, who has published 24 novels under two pen names. Adivising a few select companies I really loved. And a great many other things that went nowhere, which is most of what building is.

I just stopped telling anyone outside my close circle about any of it. That turns out to be a habit you can lose, and I lost it for years.

My son is moving back out of the house on Tuesday. And my daughter moved out a month ago to attend college. I couldn’t be prouder of the two of them and have love (nearly) every second of our time living under the same roof. But that season is over, and I wouldn’t change it for all the money in the world. But now I am pointing the same energy I have been putting into our family back at building – in public this time. Unpolished, and including the parts that don’t work. I know how to build amazing things. I have a lot to learn about the “in public” half. So to quote Sam Reich from the Game Changers I watch with my son, “The only way to learn is by playing, the only way to win is by learning, and the only way to begin is by beginning.”

Luckily, learning is still the thing I do best.

I have been building. A lot. Like most developers that have been given superpowers by this LLM age - I’ll talk about the downsides and my take in later posts - I have at last check 158 reports of apps I have built that were useful enough to push to private repos on Github so I didn’t lose them. But due to the costs of LLMs to power those apps, they sit on my hard drive without ever making it to the internet. So the first app that I’m going to release helps to solve this. It is an open-source project called BYOLLM. Tomorrow’s post is about that. This one is just: hello again, I’ve been living a great life, I’ve made a ton of cool stuff, and I can’t wait to start sharing it with you guys.