What I do
I design, build and test speech and AI systems, and I tell people the truth about the ones they are about to build or buy. The work is speech recognition, applied AI and systems architecture. I have written software for more than 45 years, from an Altair front panel to encrypted fintech on the Cloudflare edge.
How I got here
I started programming at about seven, in the late 1970s, from David Ahl’s BASIC games books and the front-panel switches of an Altair. In the 1980s I ran bulletin boards. I enlisted in the Navy in 1990 and served on the USS Missouri during Desert Shield and Desert Storm. After the Navy I tested software at Sierra, Aldus and Spry, then joined Microsoft/MSNBC in 1995 as a software design engineer. From 1996 I ran my own consulting firm, and I have been a CTO at SmartChannels, Einstrong, ZettaZing and SmartEar. The whole timeline is on the career page.
Along the way, in college and on contract work, I learned on IBM iron: an AS/400 and a 9221 mainframe. I punched cards, and I leased time on the mainframe by the hour. You desk-checked your code before you submitted a deck, because a missing comma didn’t cost you a keystroke, it cost you a day. FORTRAN, COBOL, PL/I, RPG, REXX.
By the 2000s I had an 8 Mbps point-to-point microwave link feeding a 60-server data center in my basement, complete with dedicated cooling. I was running "the cloud" before AWS existed.
What I have built
I built Workbench, the publishing engine behind MSNBC.com. At ZettaZing I built Echo, a push platform stress-tested at 30 million concurrent connections on more than 3,000 EC2 instances. As chief software architect at FortifID I rebuilt an identity platform for scale and modularity. I co-founded a voice AI company and led its technology for six years, delivering speech recognition and push-to-talk analytics to government radio users, including DHS and the US Coast Guard. The work produced a granted patent on walkie-talkie network analytics, and it included the radio interface hardware that let the software key a transmitter. The public record is linked on the career page.
What I am working on now
I run Abundera, an encrypted personal-finance platform plus QR and e-signature products, built solo on the Cloudflare edge with no frameworks. I am building AMBIE, acoustic intelligence for speech recognition in high-noise environments, and Handhelm, a browser automation harness that pauses for human approval before consequential actions. I also run Deadroom Ventures LLC, a Nevada software company operating brands including Kettlehop Games. I publish dated research on speech, language models and agent systems on the AI page, edit the RoamingPigs Field Manual, and build interactive machines at Logical Art, from a working 1975 Altair 8800 to a language model you can train in the browser. The ventures page lists the rest, with current status.
How I work
I don’t sell “digital transformation.” I sell reality checks: a clear answer on one decision, in writing, from someone who has seen the problem before. Every figure I publish carries a date and a method, and I write down what I got wrong. I learn by building the thing and finding out where it fails.
The spirit of the years I spent traveling is how I work: go where the good stuff is, commit fully, never half-measure anything. I don’t sit still. I don’t stay in the corporate pen. I go where the problem is.
Patents, service and school
My patents and the Navy decorations I earned, including the Battle “E” Ribbon and a Letter of Commendation from the commanding officer of the USS Missouri, are on the homepage. I studied computer science at San Diego State University and at Coleman University.
Beyond the work
The RoamingPigs name, my late wife MJ, the years we spent traveling, and the games, books, comics and pepper that fill the rest of my life are on the Off the Clock page.
Get in touch
To work together, see the services or write to me. I am also on LinkedIn, Mastodon, Bluesky, Hugging Face, Kaggle, and ORCID.