In the spring of 1996, in a coffee shop in Seattle, someone asked me if I knew how to design websites. I spent the next few weeks reading books on HTML, human-computer interaction, and information architecture, and I built my first website (for a ridiculous amount of money) using Photoshop and BBEdit. Two years later I was a lead designer at a fast-growing online bookstore called Amazon.com, and I haven’t looked back.
Since then I’ve been living mostly in the startup world, taking ideas sketched on a whiteboard and making them into real products in the hands of delighted users.
I guess people like working with me
I ask former teammates for recommendations, and one thing I hear a lot is, “I just like working with you. You need to put that on your site.” So, there it is.
At a meetup recently I was asked what keeps me working in this field, what is it I love about doing this job. Earlier in my career I would have said working on interesting projects or cool tech. These days I find that I love working on cross-functional teams. Bringing a group of people from every discipline in an organization into the same room to ideate, to solve problems for our users, and to build great products.
I’m originally from Austin, TX — but I’ve lived in a lot of places in the US: Connecticut, NYC, Cupertino, Seattle, and Bainbridge Island, WA. I’ve settled in the Mount Tabor area of Portland, Oregon. When I’m not in front of my monitors, I’m walking around Mt. Tabor Park with my partner, Kelly, eating ramen with my two boys, watching Avatar the Last Airbender reruns with my step-daughter, or cuddling with my chihuahua, Groot (or out riding one of my many bikes).
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There are a lot of athletes in my family. I was a semi-pro triathlete in the early 90s, and have spent most of my life racing cyclocross and mountain bikes. My older son was on the varsity cross-country team that won the Oregon State Championships in 2019, and my younger son has the Oregon state bench-press record for his weight class.
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I graduated with a double major: Graphic design & Illustration—but for the first 7 years after graduation, I was an illustrator, painting for mostly NYC based magazines and ad firms.
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I love to cook. Mostly Italian, French, Mexican, and Texas home cookin’. I have an enchilada recipe that I’ve been working on for over 20 years.
