I was never cool. I'm probably still not.

In middle school, I got swirlies. Got beat up. Had maybe two friends on a good day. And every day I'd come home to the one thing that didn't judge me: a beige computer with a blinking cursor.

The problem was, loving computers made you a target. You couldn't be into this stuff and be cool. Society wouldn't allow it. So I gave up on cool.

Then I found the hacker movies.

Hackers. Sneakers. WarGames. The Net. I was obsessed.

In these movies, the nerds weren't getting swirlies. They were saving the world. They had style. They had danger and excitement. They got the girl. And they had something I desperately wanted: control.

Not control over other people. Control over your own life. In front of a computer, nobody could tell you what you were worth. No bullies. No social hierarchy. Just you and unlimited potential.

Dade Murphy. Martin Bishop. David Lightman. Angela Bennett. They weren't asking for permission. They were building their own worlds.

At 2 AM, messing with QBasic or building AOL scrollers, so was I.

When I made this website, I didn't want another digital business card. I wanted something I would have lost my mind over as a kid. A place with secrets, whispers, little challenges hiding in the cracks.

So I hid things.

There's a terminal you can type commands into. There are achievements you can unlock. There are easter eggs scattered throughout the site that most people will never find. And I made a deliberate design decision: most visitors won't discover any of this.

And that's okay.

This isn't about mass appeal. It's not about making sure everyone gets the same experience. If you just want to read my resume and move on, you can do that. But if you want to get to know me? Really get to know me? This is how you do it.

I'm not going to spell everything out. That would defeat the purpose. But I'll give you a taste.

The achievements are love letters to the movies that kept me sane. "Hack the Planet" is there. "Too Many Secrets" is there. "The Only Winning Move" is there. If you know, you know. If you don't, maybe go watch some 90s hacker films. They hold up. Mostly.

There's a game called SPUDGAME.EXE. It's a text adventure. It has multiple endings. One of them is... unusual. Finding it will take some patience.

Text adventures were a huge part of my childhood. GemStone on AOL at $2.50 an hour. Zork. Hugo Whodunit. When I got stuck, I'd call my grandpa, and either he or my dad would dial into a BBS on a DOS terminal to look up hints.

My dad would stand behind me. "Read faster! We're getting charged!"

Those long distance calls cost a fortune. Worth every penny. There was magic in typing commands into a screen and watching a whole world unfold in plain text. Your imagination did the graphics.

There's a guestbook. Remember guestbooks? After upgrading from Geocities to my first real hosting account, I finally got a guestbook working with CGI. I thought I'd built something amazing. CGI was a nightmare to configure. Half the time the script just wouldn't run. When it finally worked, I refreshed the page a hundred times just to watch it load. The number of people who find this one might be zero. I'm genuinely okay with that.

And there are nods to my origin story. Like the "Punted" achievement. If you read my other article, you'll know I used to make chat room scrollers on AOL. Flooding rooms with text. Chaos. Beautiful chaos. That achievement is a direct callback to that era.

My whole path started with a .bat file when I was six. Then autoexec.bat. Then QBasic. Each thing I learned let me make the screen a little more mine. I could express myself in ways I couldn't anywhere else.

The journey was difficult. Lonely. The world kept telling me I couldn't be cool, couldn't amount to anything. But those movies, the thrill of discovery, the satisfaction of making something work? That made me want it more.

I'm in my forties now. I have a career. I've led teams. I've built software that handles millions of requests.

Still ZeroCool. Still happiest in front of a keyboard. Still burying easter eggs into things I make.

The bullies from middle school are probably doing fine. I don't know. I don't keep tabs. But I won too. It took until recently to finally show this side of myself to the world. This site is part of that. The journey that started with a .bat file is still helping me grow and be me.

And now, if you're curious enough to explore, you can see a little bit of what it was like to be him.

Either way, thanks for spending a few minutes learning about me. That means a lot.