The work was real, the systems shipped, and almost none of it was ever mine to keep.

Early on, at a shop called EAS Technologies, I wrote the communications protocol between the retinal biometric access-control devices and the data behind them, in C++, back when biometrics was something you read about in spy novels instead of something you walked past on the way into a building. Hundreds and hundreds of those devices went into the field. Around the same time I wrote the software that programmed Intel EPROMs against silicon that hadn't shipped yet. After that came the tour. A last-minute Y2K contract converting a stock-and-commodities trading system off an IBM System/36, COBOL to C#, on a deadline that physically could not move. WorkBroker at The Rawlings Company, a distributed compute grid that ran on idle office PCs after everyone went home, mining Medicare and Medicaid subrogation cases by the thousands a day, all of it under HIPAA. Then a decade at Salesforce on a multi-threaded C# service that spoke SMPP at platform scale, moving SMS for Marketing Cloud and eventually lifting it onto Hyperforce. You can blame me for some of those texts.

I was good at it. That was never the problem. The problem was spending four decades knowing exactly what I'd have done differently and having it not be my call, because the platform was someone else's, the deadline was someone else's, and whatever I built belonged to someone else the moment it shipped.

I retired in March 2024 figuring I was done with code. The break held about a year, until a weather app that wanted me to type in my latitude and longitude by hand dragged me back in. This isn't 1981. My husband Ben, who's had thirteen years of marriage to get tired of me griping about bad software, told me to learn Rust and do better. So I did. Tempest came first, a weather app that doesn't make you type in coordinates, then Powercurve, then more, and the work has spread out from there. That part never actually retired: I see the thing everyone else walked past and shipped anyway, and I can't leave it broken.

The blog is where I work through the rest. Linux as a daily driver, why open source still matters, the surveillance machinery quietly getting wired into ordinary software, and whatever else won't leave me alone. Some of it is technical. Some of it is just me arguing with an industry I spent my whole career inside. The code lives on GitHub.

I was there for the BBS era, the DOS days, the OS/2 detour, the Windows decades, the Apple years, the AWS sprawl, and now Linux. On my own machine, running Arch, in Indianapolis with Ben, finally building things that are mine.

Building things that are mine turned out to be only half of it. I wasn't tired of the work, I was tired of it belonging to someone else the moment it shipped. That is fixed now. The call is finally mine, and I would rather spend it helping other people make theirs: what to build, what to leave alone, where AI earns its place and where it doesn't. The honest answer is usually less than what you were about to buy, and I will tell you that even when it costs me the work.