I am an Internet entrepreneur, author, and business consultant. I live near Denver, Colorado, and have clients both locally and worldwide. If you are going to hire me, then you need to know something about me, who I am and how I got here; here is a short summary of my education and career.

After high school in Oklahoma, my last stop in the series of my dad’s Air Force assignments, I went to Oberlin College for two years, studying computer science and economics. Being 20 and thus omniscient, I decided I needed no further schooling and moved to Washington State to seek my fortune. I wound up taking a contract job as a software development engineer/tester at Microsoft, a job I won partially on the strength of being able to sight-read a piece of straightforward embedded SQL / COBOL code and guess/tell my interviewer what it would do, but primarily on the strength of the fact that the interviewer had attended Dartmouth, and was intellectually lonely for fellow liberal arts types in a sea of tech school graduates and self-taught math geniuses. Working at Microsoft was a natural fit for my first “real” post-college job, since I had been marinating in computers since I was eight years old, and had already held a number of IT/programming and technical part-time jobs in high school and college.

I spent several years at Microsoft in a variety of capacities, from contract software developer on the SQL Server 6.0 release, to working on the team attempting to bring Microsoft Bob 2.0 back to life, to a delightful stint working on loan to Dreamworks SKG in their LA studios, midwifing their first-ever software release cycle. At Microsoft I was a hired gun, deployed on projects that needed my unique blend of error-seeking debug methodology, duct-tape programming style, and candid openness about software quality issues. (Translation: when shown code that stunk on ice, I could find all the rotting pieces that were making it stink, I could show where they came from, and I was distressingly persistent about labeling showstopping bugs as showstopping bugs.) Some of my managers at Microsoft found this useful and helpful, because their primary goal was shipping software with few bugs; others found this disruptive, because their primary goal was producing a bug status report that said there were zero bugs.

After a while I couldn’t take the Seattle climate anymore and moved to sunny Colorado, where I continued my software development career at local powerhouses Optika (now defunct – it wasn’t my fault) and Quark. After a while, however, having explored the world of software development about as much as I was going to without a degree and some management chops, I went back to school to finish off a business degree and in the same general time frame started my writing and web content company, DocRocket. I also founded the citizen journalism news site Blogger News Network in 2002, and split my time between DocRocket, BNN, and other speculative ventures. With a lot of help from a first-rate editorial team, BNN was an overnight success in just five or six years, and has now grown to 600,000 monthly readers, making it one of the largest blogosphere news sites. DocRocket put together web content packages for organizations ranging from tiny custom cabinetry operations to enormous law firm-funded research libraries online, and also produced books, white papers, research reports, and business plans.

In 2009 I was lucky enough to find a great partner for DocRocket in the person of Karen Babcock, our longtime editor and contributor. With Karen’s support backstopping DocRocket’s daily operations, I am now making time available for business consulting. Throughout my tenure at DocRocket, I effectively served as a business consultant to all of my hundreds of clients, as nearly all of them required, requested and received guidance on how to use the content they were buying from us. My new emphasis on consulting will represent an expansion of something I’ve been honing my skills at for about a decade.

Click the tabs at the top of the page to get more information about me and my services, or contact me by e-mail or give me a call at 719-302-2237 to learn more.