As I sit here typing this, reflecting over the past 30 years, it’s still hard to wrap my head around how I got here. Nearly three decades later and I’m still wondering how a chance occurrence became the spark that launched a career and a lifelong obsession.

My First Love

Before any of that, I was certain my purpose in life was to be an artist. Art was my first love. Truly, deeply, madly, head over heels kind of love. I was late for my first day of kindergarten because I wouldn’t stop drawing. As a teenager I was barely functional in the mornings because I’d stayed up sketching the night before. When my family fought, I went to my bedroom and painted. As a young adult barely scraping by, it was the thing that kept me sane. Art has always been there for me, which is probably why I sometimes take it for granted. It’s like an unappreciated girlfriend that loves you no matter how bad you screw up. That’s no way to treat a lady.

Music on the other hand was the other girl. You know the one. The one you can’t stop thinking about. The one that makes you melt every time she smiles at you. The habit you can’t seem to kick no matter how hard you try.

Both of those loves were analog long before the internet showed up. I didn’t start working digitally until my introduction to MacPaint in the late 80s. It was a simple program and nowhere near as powerful as what came after, but it was my first introduction to making visual art on a screen. Not long after, I found myself watching a colorist scan and color comic pages with an early version of Photoshop at the publisher I was illustrating for at the time. I didn’t get behind the wheel myself until much later, but the seed had been planted.

It Started With a Friend and a Browser

In 1998 I started working for a DSL provider. Not because I knew what I was doing, but because I was desperate to to stop working as a laborer and they were desperate for warm bodies to answer phones. It wasn’t glamorous, but it helped pay for my vinyl addiction and put me in the same room with someone who was pivotal in shaping who I’d become. That person was my friend Dave.

Dave and I shared similar interests. We both loved music, but he went much deeper into it and was already into development way before I even knew what that meant. I still remember the moment I walked past his desk and noticed what looked like a bunch of gibberish on his screen. “What is that?” I asked. “I’m making a link,” he said. Confused, I asked “What’s a link?”

And that’s how it all started.

From that point on, I spent most of my days at work teaching myself how to build websites. Eventually, I saved enough to buy a computer and kept learning at home. None of it felt like work. For me it was just another outlet to make something.

Building Spaces for Music Before I Knew How to Make Any

In all that time I was still heavily involved in music and DJing, frequenting sites like Betalounge, Groovetech and Live365, which only fueled my obsession with merging music and dev together. There were entire worlds built around music communities and forums, something I became obsessed with and still love to this day.

There were some incredible communities back then. Freespeech, run by Brock Van Wey and Steve Schieberl. Mix of the Week, run by ODJ Pirkka. Shizm, run by Brian Tanti and Ivan De La Cruz. 95North.com by Doug Smith and Richard Payton. DistrictSoul.com by Avery and LBS. Deep House Page by Gerard Rose. Deeprhythms by Timo Rotonen. And the gloriously chaotic Statuskuo.com, run by Kai Kuo. As I got better at building, I started maintaining a lot of the sites I used to just visit, which felt like a natural extension of everything I was already doing. All of it was a labor of love. There was a genuine mutual passion around those communities and I became friends with a lot of the DJs and producers who frequented them. Some of which are still in my life today.

Alongside all of that I launched my own site, killingcaterpillars.com, which I ran for several years. KC was where everything I was passionate about merged… music, design, dev, all in one place. I even had my own forum, Tangible Thoughts, and a Live365 stream called Tangible Sound running alongside it.

It was also around this time I got a real sense of just how accessible music heroes could be when community brought everyone together. I was DJing locally in Denver when I heard a mix by King Britt with a Jay Denes remix of Maxwell’s “Fortunate.” I’d been hunting for it on vinyl and decided to post on King Britt’s own forum on the off chance someone could help. King actually messaged me directly, asked for my details and said he’d be in touch. A week later a box arrived at my door with pre-releases from Ovum and Columbia, and the Fortunate remix included. He’d even had someone from Columbia’s A&R team follow up to make sure I got it. That gesture really stuck with me. Still does.

What It All Added Up To

It’s hard to overstate how important those early days were for me. I cut my teeth as a developer and what I learned stayed with me throughout the years. It was an incredible time to be web developer because most of us had no clue what we were doing. We were just figuring it out as we went. And those communities taught me a lot, not just about music and design, but about crafting something that resonated. Things were much different back then. Websites had character and the communities behind them were vibrant and engaged. There wasn’t so much noise and the people running these communities didn’t suffer fools lightly. You had to earn their respect with what you put out and it made you sharper because of it.

Nearly three decades later I’m still here. Still building websites, still obsessed with playing and making music.

I think about that a lot. How none of it was planned. How one conversation at a desk in a call center quietly set the whole thing in motion. I didn’t know what a link was. Now I build them for a living. I didn’t know how to make music. Now I help other people finish theirs. It started with a browser and a question I didn’t know to ask. Funny how that works. –