A comprehensive bio would be polished, complete, and a little bit of a lie — nobody’s life ships finished. So here are my release notes instead: the versions, the deprecations, the patches that mattered, and the known issues still open. Honest, versioned, still shipping.
Everything below actually happened — the expensive parts especially, and the earliest entries are pulled straight from my own 2015 website.
v0.5 — the technician (archived)
Pulled straight from my own 2015 website: before I ever managed a product, I built and ran the infrastructure. A campus helpdesk, then an infrastructure internship rebuilding a DNS server on AWS for 100+ domains, virtualization, the whole sysadmin stack — plus a pile of languages I actually shipped in. That’s why the “I write a little code” line isn’t false modesty and isn’t a bluff: I was hands-on technical first, then moved up the stack. You manage builders best when you’ve been one.
v0.9 — CosmicShades & the Senate floor (archived)
Same archive: in college I ran a small distributed WordPress studio (CosmicShades), sat as a Purdue Student Government senator and its parliamentarian, directed a computing career fair, and played french horn in the marching band. The parliamentarian job planted something permanent — rules exist to protect everyone’s equal access to a fair process, the very first draft of “boundaries are load-bearing.” I was already frustrated by people who legislated in isolation instead of consulting their peers: the peer bench, years before I had a word for it. I even wrote back then that I didn’t love being a public figure but felt a duty to inform and connect — the same private-person, public-duty tension that later let the community talk me into this. My motto then, borrowed from Hillel: “If not me, then when? If not me, then who?” I’ve dialed down the urgency and kept the responsibility.
v1.x — the product years
I came up as a product manager. Software taught me the discipline I still run on: move quickly, fail fast, because most consequences are smaller than the cost of waiting. Hypothesis, test, evaluate — over and over until it was less a method and more a reflex.
v2.x — the flywheel, first turns
I built a small portfolio of professional-service businesses designed to feed each other — every client of one a warm lead for the next, every asset working for the whole system. This is the machine everything else in the story happens to. It worked, so I got confident. Confidence is where the next entry comes from.
v2.5 — the retail spoke (deprecated)
Then I tried to bolt a new spoke onto the flywheel: a retail camera shop. A luxury product, during a recession, in a market too small to carry it — and worse, a misguided execution of the thing I actually cared about (helping people take better photos and live through their memories). Community photography, sold as inventory. And the damage did NOT stay contained to the spoke: the costs and the burnout it dragged in nearly took the whole flywheel down with it. Fail-fast is not fail-free — this one flirted with taking everything.
v2.6 — the patch that mattered
It held. Barely, but it held — and I used the near-miss as the best audit I ever ran. I pruned what didn’t truly feed the system, reinforced what did, and turned containment from a hope into a rule: every spoke now has to be able to fail without reaching for the others. The recovery afterward — settling what was owed, rebuilding quietly, choosing forward over bitter — is baked into how I move now. The mission survived the vehicle, too — it’s still the root system under the services I run. Deprecating the version is not deprecating the dream.
v3.x — building to last (current)
Now the burnout math is managed by bouncing between spokes — when one drains me, another restores me, and the system earns either way — and by boundaries drawn on purpose: which corner never bends, where my job ends and a partner’s begins, what I simply don’t do. New since the near-miss: I build for the long term, which means documenting the playbooks and planning to pass the knowledge along, so I could step away someday if I ever want to. A flywheel that only spins while I’m holding it isn’t finished.
v3.5 — the peers (current)
A one-person flywheel spins fine and gets lonely fast. So the flywheel isn’t only businesses — it’s people. I share what I learn with my real-estate-photography peers and my event-photography peers, and I bet on them bringing their lessons back, so a field of supposed competitors quietly turns into a bench of colleagues who all get sharper. Isolation is efficient right up until it isn’t. Community is load-bearing too.
known issues — v.next
The boundaries are newer than the habits, so they still get tested. Burnout is managed, not cured. And this consulting practice is itself a live experiment — hypothesis: my playbooks transfer. Currently in test. You’re reading the evaluation instrument. The honest meta-issue: I don’t know that consulting is the final place either. It took a lot of versions to get here and the changelog isn’t closed — that’s not indecision, it’s the method. This is the current best build, not the last one.
I’ve worked retail and owned it, worked service and still own it, designed and promoted events and still work them — running sound, video, and the occasional DJ set — stood on a factory floor, managed products, written enough code to respect the people who write it for a living, and rotated on and off more nonprofit boards than I’ve kept count of. I’ve never been cagey about any of it — the whole résumé’s on the table, dents and all.
Finding my place took a while, and I’m not certain this is the final place. But nothing was wasted: every version imported something the current one still runs on.
imports from
Reading a room. What a genuinely good recommendation is worth — and how fast a person feels a fake one.
imports from
The expensive lesson (see v2.5). The right mission can still pick the wrong vehicle, and the bill comes anyway.
imports from
Craft held to somebody else’s standard before it was ever held to mine. You learn the standard by living under it.
imports from
The whole P&L and the whole reputation land on one desk. Still do. That desk is where the boundaries got drawn.
imports from
Logistics as choreography — plus the production under it: I run sound and video too. A great event is boring for the person running it; every surprise was supposed to be handled backstage, and the AV nobody notices is the AV that worked.
imports from
I DJ on the side. Reading a room and changing the plan mid-song is the fastest hypothesis-test-evaluate loop I run — play it, watch the floor, adjust before the next eight bars. OODA with a crossfader.
imports from
A line moves at the speed of its slowest station. I go looking for that station in every business now.
imports from
The loop (v1.x). Hypothesis, test, evaluate — on a schedule, with a kill-or-keep date before I’m attached.
imports from
Not extensively — just enough to know the tools and manage builders without bluffing them. Respect the people who make the thing.
imports from
Mission and money in the same room, arguing. When to lean in, and — the harder skill — when to step off.
pulled a little from every one of these — the philosophy is just the merge.
Every experiment — a business, a price, a guide, a boundary — enters the same loop: state what you believe will happen, test it cheaply and quickly with a kill-or-keep date attached, evaluate honestly, and either fold the lesson in or fold the experiment. That’s the whole machine. The Failure Ledger is just its output log.
Written down, falsifiable, before you’re invested. “I believe X will happen because Y.”
The cheapest, fastest version that could prove you wrong — with the verdict date on the calendar.
Honestly, on the date, against the written hypothesis — not against how hard you tried.
Mine isn’t the only loop — everyone operates differently, and one of these will probably fit your hand better. Steal whichever resonates:
W. Edwards Deming
yes, the same Deming from my bookshelf — his loop bakes the studying in, which is the step everyone skips.
John Boyd
built for fighter pilots; brutally good when the situation changes faster than your plan.
Eric Ries, The Lean Startup
the software version of the same truth: the minimum thing that teaches you something real.
a few thousand years of humans
question, hypothesis, experiment, conclusion. everything above is this, wearing work clothes.
Here’s the honest reason the release-notes thing isn’t just a bit. I’ve lived a lot of lives — technician, parliamentarian, shop owner, event guy, DJ, product manager, operator — and somewhere in there I made peace with a hard fact: I will not remember everyone I’ve met or everything I’ve done. There’s too much of it, and closing a business and recovering from it taught me to keep moving forward instead of cataloguing the wreckage.
So I built a framework instead of leaning on memory. When someone from an earlier chapter finds me — a past client, a senator I served with, someone who bought a camera from me a decade ago — I don’t need total recall. I need a way to place them, honor what we shared, and help them update their mental “version” of me to the one shipping now. Versioning is how I do that on the fly.
It keeps the story honest and it keeps it kind: every past version was real, and every one is allowed to be deprecated without being disowned. If you knew an older release of me, this page is the changelog.
you don’t have to remember me perfectly — neither do I. that’s what the changelog is for. tell me which version you met, and I’ll help you patch up to current.
“Deprecating the version is not deprecating the dream.”
— David Teter · v3.x, still shipping
If any version of this story rhymes with yours — the misstep, the burnout math, the mission looking for its right vehicle — that’s exactly the conversation I like having.
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