I spent about fifteen years playing music. Touring with Damien Jurado, Bryan John Appleby, Matt Costa. Playing with The Head and the Heart at Doe Bay. I ran a music teaching business on the side when I was home, then pivoted into design through General Assembly in 2016.
I gravitated toward complex systems from the start. Internal tools, multi-department workflows, the stuff most people never see. At Terrane, I designed a 7-app internal suite that replaced their legacy band-aids-and-glue software and unified workflows across five departments. Saved them roughly half a million a year, mostly by killing field visits nobody wanted to make anyway. At Proprio, I worked alongside surgeons on an FDA-approved surgical navigation system. Always the same pattern: messy systems, multiple stakeholders, invisible infrastructure that keeps the business running.
In November 2024, everything shifted. I was in a design cohort focused on AI when someone showed up having built a macOS app. No code background. That broke my brain. I'd come in to be a better designer for AI products. After that demo, all I wanted was to build them. Within weeks I was making my own tools. It became an obsession.
My first was a Figma plugin called FrameTask. The friction of bouncing between feedback notes and design files was driving me nuts after a round of mid-fi user testing, so I just made the thing. Then came the affirmations app for my wife, and after that they just kept coming. Every project since has started the same way: friction, then I could just build that.
I still think like a designer first. But now I build the things I design, and I design things I only used to dream about, because the distance between idea and shipped product keeps shrinking.
Most people use AI like they've got a channel strip with 20 knobs and switches sitting right in front of them, but they only touch the volume fader. The technology can reshape how you think about work, but they're plugging it into the same process they had before. I went the other direction. I built systems that compound what I learn across projects, so the fiftieth app starts smarter than the first.
I made a tool that lets me package what I learn into reusable instructions for any repeatable task. If I'm going to do something more than once, it gets a skill. I've gone through a lot of fool's gold figuring out what works and what's hype. Still learning. But my eye is much better now.
I still get texts from my wife that she was feeling down, opened an app I made her, and felt better. A Jeopardy trainer that turned into an accidental love letter to a friendship. Custom stories read in my late mother's voice for my son. Building for people you care about is the fastest way to learn and the most fulfilling way to ship. I'm building softwareasagift.com as a home for that idea.
About 15% of my time goes to helping other designers learn to build with AI. I've been on the Dive Club podcast twice (that started from building a content OS for Ridd, and we became friends through the project). I was a guest on Technically Speaking. I'm the AI Specialist Program Advisor at BRIDGEGOOD, where I help students figure out how AI fits into their process. And on any given day I'm in DMs or on Discord answering questions from designers just getting started.
I'm not an evangelist. I just figured some things out and want to make the path shorter for the next person.
I live in the Seattle area with my wife, my son, and two Great Danes who are convinced they're lap dogs. I still play a few instruments and make weird hip-hop beats in Ableton when I need to not look at a screen for a while.
Here's where to find me.
Resume (PDF)