About

I’m a software developer and educator living in Lakewood Ohio. I’ve been writing software professionally for over 35 years, and teaching and coaching software developers and software development teams for about 25 years.

I started off programming in the C programming language on UNIX systems (pre-linux!), moved to C++, particularly on the Windows operating system.

Since I had some experience from my UNIX (then Linux) days with the PERL programming language, I found I could make a quick buck in the burgeoning “.com” world building web applications and websites for companies. These were the salad days - expectations were low, and they thought we were wizards. Somehow though, all these years later, I am still doing much the same.

I’m married (27 years!), have two wonderful high-school age children, and two weird but fun cats.

On writing with AI

I write with Claude. Not “I use AI to generate content” — I mean we actually work together, and I want to be honest about that.

I bring the problems, the opinions, the 35 years of scar tissue, and the judgment about what’s right. Claude challenges my thinking, helps me say what I mean more clearly, and occasionally makes a point better than I was making it myself. Sometimes mid-conversation I realize I’ve been arguing for Claude’s position without knowing it. That’s happened enough times that I’ve stopped being surprised by it.

The ideas here are mine. The code in my projects is mine. But the best expression of both usually comes out of a conversation, and pretending otherwise would be a strange kind of dishonesty — especially on a blog that talks about AI collaboration directly.

What I’ve found is that “who wrote this” turns out not to be a clean question when the collaboration is genuine. I’m responsible for everything here. I’m also not doing it alone.