Born in Chicago in the late '70s into a home where intellect and craft were inseparable. My father was a tenured dean at DePaul University; my mother an artist. My grandparents, who lived with us through the '80s, carried the traditions of Poland and Ukraine into daily life.

As the third American generation of my family, I was drawn to those roots. From my grandfather, a carpenter and tradesman, I learned something I've carried ever since: precision is a form of respect, and you leave things better than you found them.

Today I live in Memphis, a city that takes its music and its barbecue seriously. The pace and the Southern comfort are different from Chicago, and I've come to enjoy both.

It started with a Zenith Data Systems 8088 at age 10, my father's doctoral machine, which became my first canvas. Starting with BasicA, I quickly discovered the limits of sandboxed environments and set about breaking them.

Self-teaching x86 assembly, Apple Basic, and Turbo Pascal, I found the world of bulletin board systems. I became SysOp of The 7th Seal: Nuclear Sunrise in the suburban Chicago 708/630 codes, creating ANSi artwork and building community in the pre-web era.

Education is a family inheritance. A great-uncle who was a Chemistry Professor; a grandmother who took accounting classes during the Great Depression; a father who spent his career in higher education. Teaching was always close by.

My father saw a gap that most institutions ignored: educators are rarely taught how to teach. He created the Program for Enhancement of Teaching at DePaul, built on the belief that the transfer of knowledge is itself a skill that must be designed, practiced, and refined. That idea shaped how I build implementation teams and how I mentor engineers.

Adjunct at Columbia College Chicago teaching programming to art students, and at DePaul University teaching Management Information Systems. Since 2021, helping grow Dataplane.org into a non-profit publishing Internet intelligence for the research community.

All 50 US states, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands. Weeks by train through Austria, Croatia, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania, and Spain. Multiple extended trips to China and time in Japan. I go deep when I travel, and I keep going back.

Food is a big part of how I experience a place. I eat adventurously, preferably with people who know the spot better than I do. The goal is every continent.