For me, software engineering isn’t a career track I stumbled into—it’s a generational family trade.
I grew up on a 90-acre farm in Tennessee, surrounded by room to build and explore. My early inspiration came from my grandparents’ Book and Hobby Shop, but my deep-tech roots came from my family: my grandfather was an engineer who programmed with physical punch cards, and my uncle worked deep in the computing trenches of the 1970s and 80s. Following in their footsteps, I wrote my very first lines of code when I was 14 years old—back in the pre-internet, pre-hard-drive era of computing where you had to understand system memory just to make a script compile.
Before settling into my lifelong engineering career, I took a detour through my twenties to pursue other ambitions, traveling across the United States working at Renaissance Festivals. It was an incredible chapter of life that shaped who I am, but by 29, I knew it was time to return to my true calling. I dove back into serious, full-stack programming.
Around that same time, life took an international turn. My friend introduced me to a wonderful woman who lived half a world away in Thailand. We exchanged handwritten letters for almost two years before I finally packed my bags to meet her. I instantly fell in love with the country, secured local employment as a professional programmer, and we married in the fall of 2003.
By 2006, we moved back to the United States, bought a house in Wisconsin, and I spent years pioneering remote development workflows—building software for Thai enterprises from the US long before remote work was mainstream, before transitioning to senior engineering roles for American corporations.
In 2009, my career took me to Silicon Valley. I instantly connected with the raw, high-level engineering culture (and the tech economy) of California. While family obligations initially drew me back to Wisconsin, the Valley called me back a few years later. I accepted a senior engineering position at Gaia Online—a massive virtual world and social gaming platform. What started as a short four-month contract rapidly turned into four years of deep-infrastructure coding. I worked with exceptional talent, optimization-heavy frameworks, and scaled systems handling massive, real-time user traffic.
By July of 2015, after years in the California tech pressure cooker, the landscape changed. Silicon Valley rents were skyrocketing past $3,000 a month, and the fast-paced corporate grind was leading to burnout. At the same time, family priorities shifted; my children were grown, and my wife’s parents required dedicated care back in Southeast Asia.
We made the deliberate choice to exit the corporate race track and return permanently to Thailand.
I’ve worked remotely for wonderful companies since then, including more work for Gaia, Teaching Textbooks, and Say Games.
Today, I operate as an independent full-stack engineer and digital code surgeon from my private garden code hut in Thailand. I don’t run a bloated agency, I don’t outsource my contracts, and I don’t use automated AI tools to guess the answers to complex logic failures. Whether I am untangling a broken web game engine or migrating an over-engineered framework back to clean, server-side PHP, you are getting my raw, unfiltered 20+ years of battle-tested software architecture focused entirely on your project.