About

About

Hi, I'm Jacob. I spend my days on the operations side of tech.

I am not a developer. I did build some websites in FrontPage 98 and Dreamweaver back in the day, so technically I have prior experience. Then CSS happened and I retired.

I studied liberal arts at Harvard — via their extension program, which was half the price of the University of Phoenix, so make of that what you will. Three courses short of the degree. I've made peace with it. Though I'll probably go back for kicks.

What I've learned about learning is that we don't really retain the details anyway — we abstract ideas down to their simplest form and store those. The essence of things. Formal education always felt like a box to check. What actually sticks is what you go find yourself, out of pure curiosity. That kind of self-directed learning I've always been good at. Which, it turns out, is exactly the right preparation for what's coming.

I peaked at PowerPoint. I can do pivot tables in Excel, which I considered my technical ceiling for a long time. I took one Python course in college and briefly enrolled in CS50 — Harvard's intro to computer science, which I mention only because it sounds impressive. I had to drop it because I couldn't get Scratch to work. Scratch is a visual coding app designed to teach programming concepts to children. CS50 uses it as the on-ramp. I couldn't get on the ramp. The Python manual was written in Klingon. I checked. I did buy a lifetime subscription to Dataquest on a Black Friday sale, which I open occasionally when I feel motivated, complete about half a lesson, and then close. It's been very good for Dataquest.

For years I had ideas. Good ones, I think. Software that could solve real problems, tools that could make work better, things I wanted to exist in the world. I could map out the logic, design the workflow, describe exactly how it should behave. But I always hit the same wall: I couldn't build the actual software. That's what developers are for. People like me write the requirements doc and hand it to someone else, or more often, just let the ideas quietly die in a notes app somewhere.

Then the barrier disappeared.

We are living through something genuinely strange and exciting. The technical skills that used to gatekeep building — the years of study, the computer science degree, the knowing what a "for loop" is — matter less every day. What's starting to matter more is the quality of your ideas. Your ability to see a problem clearly. Your creativity. Your taste.

When there are no limits to your technical skills, what would you build? What problems would you solve? I think about this a lot. The answer, it turns out, is: find out.

So now I build things. Real things. Things that run in browsers and talk to APIs and get deployed on actual servers. My tech stack is vibes and prayer. Not the church kind — more the staring-into-the-infinite kind. The Upanishads ask who is the one doing the seeing. The Dhammapada asks what the mind is doing with itself. I ask what does npm run dev mean. We're all just trying to understand the nature of things.

I don't have it all figured out. But I'm building, and shipping, and learning what's possible when you stop waiting for permission to be technical. Which brings me back to Sally Struthers. Those late night commercials in the eighties and nineties for the International Correspondence School — learn TV and VCR repair from home, build a real career — were maybe onto something. Maybe that diploma in TV/VCR repair was the move all along. Sally, I think you were right. Just thirty years early and one technology cycle off.

And if the cosmic simulation is about to get a major upgrade — if we're heading somewhere where survival isn't the whole agenda and we finally get the time to ask who we are and what we actually want to make — I figure the best thing I can do is stay curious, keep building, and write it all down. For those willing to explore, there's a whole new world of capability waiting that you probably thought was impossible. I know because I thought that too. Last week.

This one's for everyone who ever had an idea and assumed they'd need to hire someone to build it. You might be more accidentally technical than you think.

This blog is the whole messy journey, written down.

Not a developer. Not not a developer. Follow along if you want to see what happens.