The first program I wrote in the early 1980s involved a stack of cards fed into a reader to a time-shared mainframe that would eventually send the result back to a track-fed printer, if there wasn’t too much static on the telephone line. In the 1980s & 90s, I had an established career with an earned professional designation in the general insurance industry, analyzing, identifying, and addressing risk over more than a dozen years.
Since then, I’ve been involved in almost every aspect of the IT & ICT sectors for more than 25 years, operating an ISP from dialup through launching a broadband wireless network covering 10,000 km2 from 20 points of presence including our own datacenter. One of these projects was written up as a case study for Industry Canada on successfully launching rural broadband networks.
At the end of the 1990s and into the early 2000s, I ran a Linux and FLOSS advocacy proto-blog; got Slashdotted then and in the later 2000s while writing for CIO.com. I’ve been building websites from that time through today, moving from basic hand-coded info-sites then to web apps and portal sites today. As a b2 user, I evaluated all 3 significant forks before landing on WordPress, building all manner of websites and using it as an application framework since before the code merge with multisite in 3.0 (2010), I’ve now worked on hundreds of websites, mostly in WordPress, for which I’ve been an advocate for over 20 years. As a believer in FLOSS ideals, I’ve also been running a Linux desktop for more than 2 decades now.
I’m an owner and manager of a niche hosting company. Four years ago we also acquired an agency, Modern Earth, which now focuses on building websites and web apps with WordPress.
In the fall of 2024, I became involved in the AspirePress project, and while managing that project, I engaged with the FAIR project in 2025 working toward the shared goal of addressing the inherent risk in having a single-source provider for all WordPress package updates.