(I wrote this web page in the 1990s, and it's barely changed since!)
I was born on the island of Kodiak in Alaska. My father is a commercial fisherman, boat builder, inventor, and entrepreneur. My family moved to the city of Sequim in the state of Washington when our house in Kodiak burned down (I was 5). Most of my summers were spent working on a fishing boat in Alaska. After high school (graduated 1989) I spent some time as a missionary in the Philippines. After that I enrolled at Brigham Young University in Utah. I married Tressa Stapley on December 18, 1993. Our son Gavin was born March 29, 1995. I graduated in August 1997 with a major in Computer Science and a minor in Psychology and Physics (well, almost Physics). While there, I worked as a research assistant in the Performance Evaluation Laboratory of the Computer Science department. After college, I spent a year and a half working for TBRS Technology, on my Dad's fish filleting machine invention. Our daughter Brinn was born March 4, 1999, and shortly afterward we moved to Arizona, where I worked as a software engineer for Conceptual Systems and Software. Tayla was born March 11, 2001. After about three years, we moved back to Sequim to help my Dad out with his new company, AlaskaCatch. After that, I got work with a startup company in Tucson, Arizona, called DMetrix where I worked as a software engineer. Our son Kade was born January 24, 2003. After that, I started work in Fort Huachuca, AZ at the JITC doing software development for two years. In July 2005 I left the JITC to work for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Salt Lake City, doing software development for their new family history and genealogy programs. Maylee was born March 24, 2009. After five years there, I took a job with tynt.com, working with Java, Hadoop, and Linux. On January 20, 2011, our daughter Alissa was born. In August 2011, I left Tynt, and got a new job at ValueClick (really Commission Junction) in the Santa Barbara area of Southern California. On New Year's day, 2014, we moved to Lehi, Utah, where I worked at Qualtrics until February 1, 2016. In March of 2016, I started working at Ancestry in Lehi, working on moving Ancestry into the cloud, and the working on the commerce team. Between April 2020 and June 2022, I was a Lead Software Engineer at Marqeta, on the Card Fulfillment team. From August 2022 to October 2023, I was a "Director of Engineering" at Ethic, a small startup fin-tech company based in Manhattan, NYC. In January 2024, I took on a role as a "managing consultant" doing Enterprise Software Architecture with Oteemo, where I get to apply my engineering skills and experience to help along some big software engineering projects in the Washington DC area. In May 2025, I started a new role as a Senior Lead Software Engineer at Capital One.