About

The Arc

I spent about ten 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 teaching business on the side. Then I pivoted into design through General Assembly in 2016 and spent the next eight years building a career in UX and product design.

I worked at Smartsheet. I led the design of a 7-app internal suite at Terrane that saved $500K a year. I collaborated with surgeons on an FDA-approved surgical navigation system at Proprio. I did freelance research, UX, and light branding work. I earned a Nielsen Norman Group certification. I always gravitated toward complex systems. Internal tools, multi-department workflows, enterprise software.

In November 2024, everything shifted. I was in Maheen Sahail's “Become an AI Designer” cohort when Amar Reishi (now Head of Design at Google Labs DeepMind) showed up and built a macOS app from Cursor with no code background. That blew my mind. Within weeks I was building my own tools.

My first app was a Figma plugin called FrameTask, born from the friction of bouncing between feedback notes and design files. My second was an affirmations app for my wife. I'd already sent questionnaires to her friends before I even knew I could code. The book-printing tools were terrible, so I just built an app instead.

That pattern (friction, then “I could just build that”) is how every project since has started. Eighteen months later I've shipped 12+ apps, been on 3 podcasts, coined “Software as a Gift,” published open-source Claude Code skills used by the community, and built a 10-agent AI system that runs 24/7 on a Mac Mini in my house.

I still make hip-hop beats in Ableton. I still think like a designer first. But now I build the things I design, and I help other designers learn to do the same.

Software as a Gift

I believe code is a love language. The most meaningful software I've built wasn't for clients or for clout. It was for my wife, my son, my friends. An app that reminds my wife how loved she is. A Jeopardy practice app that turned into a love letter to a friendship. Custom stories read by my late mother's voice for my son. A pick'em app for a decade-old NFL tradition. A movie picker built the same night the joke was made.

Building software for the people you care about is the fastest way to learn, the most fulfilling way to ship, and proof that this technology can be genuinely good. I'm building softwareasagift.com as a home for anyone who feels the same way.

Teaching & Community

About 15% of my time goes to helping other designers learn to build with AI. I've been on the Dive Club podcast twice talking about Claude Code workflows. I was a guest on Technically Speaking. I'm the AI Specialist Program Advisor at BRIDGEGOOD, where I help design teams integrate AI into their process. And on any given day I'm in DMs or on Discord answering questions from designers who are 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.