Introduction
I got my start in the early days of web design. Product Designer wasn’t even a job title back then — you just figured it out. BlackPlanet, Asian Avenue, MiGente — I was building social platforms before MySpace and Facebook existed. Advertising and agency work came next, and I got hooked — the chaos, the briefs, the obsession with the right word in the right place.
Advertising and agency work is brutal. In the attention economy, nobody reads the fine print or cares about what you really mean — you have a second, maybe two, to clearly communicate, to win someone over, to get someone to buy something, or in Google Analytics terms, to convert them. That obsession with clarity and concision never left me. It’s how I think about product language, interface copy, and design decisions to this day.
I carried that discipline into product design — good interface design and great marketing copy set you up for the best user experience. Every headline, every CTA, every piece of copy has to work hard or get cut. That mindset is what I brought to Hearst Magazines, where I spent over a decade building a design system from scratch. What started as 15 U.S. brands grew into a single platform, CMS, and codebase powering 60+ brands and 120+ global sites. That kind of scale doesn’t happen by accident — it happens when design, engineering, and product speak the same language and nobody is precious about their work.
What are you working on now?
I’ve been doing a lot of experiments with local AI. Its really funny, the idea that we’ve carved up a rock, shocked it with electricity, and now we’re teaching it to think.
I have a lot of thoughts about the implications of this technology, and I’m excited to see how it evolves. Obviously you can do a lot on the enterprise scale, I mean with 300 gigawatts you’d hope that you could shock some silicon into doing something useful.. but eh I’m more interested in the local applications. I think there’s a lot of potential for AI to be used in creative ways on premises, and I’m excited.
The Homelab
I have a homelab in my apartment where I live my life as a datahoarder… I gobble up cultura and media… lots of it. Film, photography, publications, museum catalogs, and lately, memes and newsclips that serve as snapshots in time during this chaotic era.
I’m a bit over 200TB raw at this point, unfortunately OpenAI bought up 40% of all HBM memory in the world, which naturally spilled over into hard drive storage and the consumer market. So I’m a bit limited in my storage options, but I’m always looking for ways to expand and optimize my setup.
In addition to data sovereignty and owning what I download, I also run a lot of self-hosted services because I’m tired of paying for subscriptions and owning absolutely nothing.
Hardware
-
Self-Hosting Cluster: I have 4x Lenovo Tiny PCs - they’re 1L cases all running Proxmox. They’re pretty powerful for their size, and they allow me to run a lot of different services and experiments without taking up too much space in my apartment. They’re all running Proxmox, which is a great open-source virtualization platform that allows me to run dozens of virtual machines and containers with only a 2-3% performance hit. It’s been a great way to maximize the resources I have and keep everything organized.
-
The Media Server: I a 12-bay Unraid NAS that I use for storage and backup thats pushing over 102TB of rust, and around 6TB of flash storage. I uh, store a lot of linux ISOs and media that I own. If I lose it? I’ll download it again.
-
NASDAQ: The TrueNAS server. This is for my more critical data thats harder to replace. Its running a 5x16TB RAIDZ2 rust pool and about 6TB of enterprise 2.5in SSDs. I use this for my most important data, like family photos and documents, and I have a backup strategy in place to make sure that data is safe.