September 26, 2022. The shelter at Stecoah Gap, our last stop on the Appalachian Trail for this leg of the hike, was comfortable. The two-story structure was well maintained and dry, with large, weathered trunks supporting a flat roof that jutted out from the open front like a brim of a miner’s hardhat. Inside, the surfaces were covered in words of past hikers, the trail names, pictographs and idioms seemed like an archeological find, and we did our best to trace the history of these strange people.

Amazingly we had cellular service available, and I had received a text about a mandatory zoom meeting the next morning.

Sun dappled the thick mossy forest floor as the smoke from the campfire lazily wafted up through the trees. Breakfast, coffee, and I’m on Zoom with the rest of the company.

My boss tells me that Hurricane Ian took a right-hand turn and will hit our hometown head on in two days.

The trip back was intense, cancelled flights diverted us to the opposite coast of Florida where we rented a car and drove to Punta Gorda, racing the storm under heavy, convoluted skies.

Traffic on Alligator Alley heading west was almost non-existent, and thick heading east, adding to the uneasiness of our endeavor.

Tornadoes were randomly spinning up, and the scene at the Punta Gorda airport where we had to pick up our friend’s car challenged the senses. Perennial twilight between bursts of rainfall revealed buses and military vehicles lined up yet deserted, as if in anticipation of an imminent invasion that had already removed the humans.

We arrived home at 2 am and started to put up the storm shutters and plywood sheets that would help us feel safe as the winds continued to pick up.

The next day I was able to reach my mother out on Pine Island by phone while the calm of the eye of the storm was overhead. The terror in her voice as she described how sections of their roof had been torn off, and storm surge water rising in the house when the phone cut out, is one of those things forever seared into my memory.

I could not get to Pine Island if I had a tank.

We spent twelve hours in a closet.

When the waters receded, we all did our best to move on.

Concatenate, Cookie Jar, Footgun and Tarball. These are real words used in software development, part of an odd language spoken by tech heads in the wild.

After the storm, over the next two years I did my best to understand this new language, and learn how to use the emerging tools at my disposal.

In one of the first meetings with my data scientist friend, he showed me how vector search worked in a database, and I was floored.

The strange realm of “pi”, the little number that helps us measure circles, marched its way into my life, and it opened up a whole new world of how things can be represented and stored, and freshly armed, I dove into the dizzying new world of A.I. to discover what I could build.

Jupyter Notebooks helped me to understand functions and how to chase down errors, many, many errors.

My fascination with things and how to represent them led me to data compression and waves. Pi, in the form of Fourier transformations, danced around my daily thoughts as I toiled in the Florida sun, and using notebooks in the evenings I created a framework to convert any type of data into a wave (I called it… Datawave).

I thought the world was waiting to hear about this amazing discovery, but no, I had yet to realize all the new information tools would also help every half-baked garage enthusiast throw thousands of ideas at the gatekeepers of what is accepted and monetized, or at least sensible.

After a failed submission to Y Combinator (a startup accelerator company), I started to understand the scope of what I was trying to step into. I was a mere mortal trying to put on a pair of Paul Bunyan’s boots.

Discovering how often successful startups are rejected helped me to understand the process, and view rejection as an opportunity to refine. Seeing the multitudes of twenty-something MIT grads churning out accepted ideas “but now with A.I.!” gave me a good dose of perspective on the long road ahead of me.

I’m oldish, no college, working a full time physically demanding job, yet somehow the hardships kept me energized and the support of the loved ones around me has (mostly) kept me grounded.

I created a submission to the OpenAI to Z challenge hosted by Kaggle using an A.I. model from OpenAI, ChatGPT. The entry was submitted through Kaggle notebooks, so it fit right in with my limited understanding and notebook work.

My submission can be found Here:

https://kaggle.com/competitions/openai-to-z-challenge/writeups/openai-to-z-challenge-submission

The OpenAI to Z Challenge analyzed satellite imagery of the Amazon basin to uncover archeological curiosities. My submission used detectors I created to look at aspects of ground features such as ambient occlusion, parallax shift and difference of gaussians, and engaged a small A.I. model for analysis. The ideas for the detectors came from my years of digital photography and photoshop experience.

I felt I made a good submission until I viewed the highly polished winning submissions, they were created by highly polished teams and made my project look like a kid’s toy.

Balancing an ever-increasing workload due to the hurricane recovery over those two years with trying to understand a new domain of knowledge was tricky, yet I never questioned the hard work. The loss of my friend solidified my resolve to create, using the grief as a fire in the forge.

As I was working on the OpenAI to Z Challenge, I came across something called “ARC-2”, and it sank its meat hooks in me. ARC-2 stands for “Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus” and is a reasoning challenge for A.I. and data systems. ARC consists of a series of puzzles that have several steps to solve. Every puzzle has been solved by ordinary people, yet the most advanced A.I. systems still struggle. The ARC-2 leaderboard can be found here: https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/arc-prize-2026-arc-agi-2/leaderboard.

I never made a submission for the ARC-2 challenge in 2025; however, I learned a lot from my work on the competition. Fifty separate notebooks devoted to ARC-2, twenty devoted to DataWave, it was a lot of work for what I thought was nothing at the time. I look back now and see this work as hands-on learning. Learning how to think in systems, how to think about knowledge, how to think about things outside of myself and my own little world.

Undeterred, I forged further into development. The seed that a small, local ai model could maintain privacy and find similarities between disparate knowledge domains was starting to germinate, yet I was still lost on how to approach the project. My ideas seemed like a far-off pipe dream, yet I started to make drawings of an interface, and work on mockups in Figma and ProtoPie.

In October of 2024 Hurricane Milton went from a tropical depression to a category 5 hurricane in about two days. Even though the hurricane made landfall over 70 miles to the north at Siesta Key, the passing storm still caused widespread flooding and damage to the entire Southwest Florida region.

In the two years since Ian, we were able to recover and rebuild about sixty out of a hundred pools, Milton knocked all but one back offline.

Pumps, heaters, all electronics, and the sand, the millions of pounds of sand. Many of our pools were half filled with sand, and the work of hand digging them under the Florida sun like groups of misfit meerkats took its physical toll, and the misery of redoing all of the work we had put in since Hurricane Ian messed with the mind.

Then a second dear friend in as many years passed away from cancer, this time it was a glioblastoma.

I was able to visit my friend in the hospital the day after his brain surgery. The doctors had shaved the front half of his head, and his long hair, long scar and staples made him look like a maniacal franken-Einstein.

We hugged, cried, and I helped him understand what had happened and what to expect. My father-in-law had died from the same thing 20 years prior, so I had some perspective.

My friend passed away six months after the operation and was much beloved and mourned by his large family and cadre of friends.

One of my departed friend’s grandchildren always had difficulty pronouncing the name “Pa” he gave him, instead, the little one called him “Pie”. Over time my friend became known as Pie to the whole family. After Pie passed, a close friend of his family arranged for a celebration of life to be held at College Hall, the historic Charles and Edith Ringling Mansion in Sarasota, Florida.

College Hall is a stately two-story pink marble structure sitting on the shore of Sarasota Bay like a massive lump of forgotten squared off coral. Naturally, the only day available for the celebration was 3/14 (National Pi Day).

Naturally, my friend’s son was given the only room available at the local hotel he booked, room 314, and when he asked for a quiet room to compose his soliloquy at the venue, he was directed to the Archimedes room upstairs.

It seemed like life was playing games at times, and I was starting to feel like southwest Florida was winning and I was losing.

A change of life, a change of scenery and a change of venue were all on the docket, and a fateful trip to the Colorado Rockies would solidify the direction of the next chapter of my life.