Why hello there.

I was born purple and covered in a sticky goo (yeah, we're going way back), out the door ahead of my twin sister. I spent some time in an incubator. Things improved drastically for me after that.
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I was raised a couple miles outside of a town in Iowa of fewer than 500 people, surrounded by cornfields and beneath the most beautiful star-filled sky every night. My father was the janitor / mechanic / grounds keeper for the town's elementary school; my mother was the librarian at the town's tiny library and a part-time teacher. I spent my time outside of classes reading or on the old Apples at either the school or town library. Many weekends and summers were spent helping out on my uncle's farm up the road from our house.
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Painfully shy and socially awkward, I preferred books and computers to sports. I had a few closeknit friends and my parents were sure to drag me out of the house every summer on some cross-country road trip. I was deeply involved with the church and the school band, playing trombone in marching, jazz, and orchestral bands. I wrote short stories and made copies of them for my friends. One such story sent me on a trip to a young writers' conference, igniting my dream of being a professional writer. Later, I took journalism classes and wrote for the school newspaper.
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My dreams took a hard left turn into the world of computers my junior year of high school. I'd always had an affinity for technology. One of my first memories is of my computer illiterate father writing an Asteroids like videogame on a Vic-20, reading from a notebook and writing the program to a cassette tape. The aforementioned school and library Apples kept me entranced until my parents bought a PC for the home when I was 12. I immediately taught myself HTML and maintained embarrassing Geocities and Angelfire websites that have thankfully been lost to the abyss.
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I created and maintained the school newspaper's website, as well as that of my 4-H club. I regularly had fun subverting my school's network restrictions and took part in some computer shenanigans that I am still proud of, but have never admitted to in writing (let's have some beers sometime and talk about it). I remember telling my mother and grandmother in 1999 that I wanted to become a professional web designer and developer and them uncomfortably suggesting I aim for something else as this worldwide web thing was sure to just be a fad.
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One thing that really catapulted me into the tech space came from a high school math teacher. I had struggled with math up until my junior year and Mr. Barnhart made things click for me enough that I was in AP math classes. We couldn't afford one of the (still) ridiculously overpriced TI-84 calculators, but I found out my Casio could run BASIC programs, so I taught myself BASIC and created quadratic equation solvers, polar coordinate graphing, and more with my discount calculator. I used them to complete quizzes and tests well ahead of my classmates. Feeling guilty that I was cheating, I admitted to Mr. Barnhart what I had created on my calculator. Rather than reprimand me, he encouraged me to continue writing programs. He instilled in me that with computers, as in math, there really is no cheating to solve a problem.
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In my senior year of high school, I joined a short-lived punk rock band. I also joined an online community attempting to get Playstation 2 games online on painfully slow dial-up modems (which I had at the time). I started using Linux. I discovered 2600 the "Hacker Quarterly", reading issues front to back. When it was time to go off to college, I started with an Associate's Degree in Network Administration, hooking together different systems, culminating in a project where a Mac, a Windows PC, and a Linux PC played a round of Battlefield Viet Nam across Cisco and Novell Netware devices. I wired miles of network cable and earned my CCNA before graduating.
 
<During college, I was working almost full-time at the local Wal-Mart. One day, a cute girl way out of my league started working in the next department over. A coworker of mine bet me $5 I wouldn't walk over and ask her out. I did so and we started dating for a few years before getting married. We recently celebrated our 15th anniversary. I never did get that $5 though.>
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I knew I wanted to keep learning, so I enrolled in a state university and started working on a degree in computer engineering. I soon ditched the soldering iron for extra math books and switched to a BS in Computer Science. It was a great program, which allowed me to narrow my focus down to Artificial Intelligence - which, in the mid-aughts was absolutely not lighting the world on fire - but I found endlessly fascinating.
 
A few classmates and I attempted the Netflix Prize in 2007, which would award $1 million to whoever could improve user rating prediction accuracy by 10%. Through the use of a Neighborhood Algorithm and neural networks trained on IMDB data, we improved accuracy by 2.5%. I also wrote a self-learning Intrusion Detection System using neural networks (called Adaptive IDS, until a classmate told me I had invented AIDS, so I renamed it Intelligent, Learning IDS (I-LIDS)). I also wrote a peer reviewed paper on de-centralized, self-governing communication networks.
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I was working at the university's College of Education in my free time, supporting their Mac labs when I applied for a part-time student role at a John Deere facility nearby. The pay was much better and I was able to do work outside of academia with some hefty stakes. My teammates involved me, a newbie CS student, in everything - I was administering Linux and Windows servers, replacing the POTS with VOIP, installing telepresence rooms, and running my own project I dreamt up and executed of replacing 200+ shopfloor PCs with thin clients. 
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<It was around this time that I discovered craft beer. Unfortunately, I was a snob. I had just turned 21, but I thought I knew everything about beer and why whatever you were drinking was terrible. One friend called me out on it, saying that if I knew so much, why don't I make it myself? So I did, and thus started down a slippery slope of brewing and learning about all things beer. This will come back into play in a big way later on in our story!>
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The problem with being a part time student employee is that you need to remain a student. Thankfully, once I graduated, I was able to jump on board Deere's new employee development program. I was assigned an 18-month stint supporting Java developers as they built and maintained business critical applications. I created an automated process to roll out LAMP stacks which saved us gobs of hours per week, and an interactive, drag-and-drop server and application management system. But I HATED the on-call rotation. I once accidentally took down Luxembourg - yes, basically the whole city state. So, when my time was up, I moved onto a role that was as different as you could get.
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I spent the next 18 months traveling around the country, training dealership employees how to use the new Windows-based PoS / business management platform. Most dealerships were migrated from 25+ year old console-based systems to this new thing. I had to teach more than one person how to use a mouse. The job was mostly consoling people that thought this new system was going to take their job (it almost never did). More than one person walked out during training and never came back.
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<My wife became pregnant during this point in my career and being on the road all of the time with a baby on the way was challenging for her and me. As much fun as it was visiting small towns all across the country (it truly was fun), I wanted to be back home.>
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My time in the program was complete, so I jumped back over to what I knew, network communications. I joined the company's worldwide network and telecom team, assigned to be responsible for the Avaya call centers and soft phones. I got to dip my toes back into the AI space with IVRs, but mostly it was all about the nitty gritty details of how to communicate over an ancient physical medium. I did get to travel a little, including an incredible trip to Germany. Another story to tell over a beer.
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<Speaking of beer, I had become president of the local homebrewers' club that consisted of 96 members during my term. It was a hell of a ride, participating in festivals and contributing to local charities, on top of creating education plans for monthly events. There was way more drama than there needed to be, and a lot of beer.>
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Seeing that my career was stalling out and I hadn't yet gotten to the level of leadership I wanted, I left that role and headed to the company headquarters. I was put in charge of the internal social media platform and the video platforms. At the time, a lot of the job was trying to convince people to use the tools. Few seemed to want or care about video and social media hadn't yet creeped into every part of our waking lives. I also inherited the clunky, on-premises DAM system. A teammate and I migrated that out to a cloud solution we had researched. I became the enterprise, international DAM guy, overseeing and growing the platform into millions of assets accessed millions of times per day. DAM and video had become powerhouses when I left exactly 10 years later.
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<I'll add in here that I kept trying to bring my AI background into my professional life over the years, with a few successes. I spent a few years fighting for an ML-based auto-tagger and I created a video transcriber, translator, and summarizer to aid those with hearing or language difficulties. I argued with so many people on how AI could help accessibility and search. ChatGPT exploding onto the scene certainly helped.>
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During those 10 years at Deere, I had gotten bored with my hobby of brewing. I felt like I had read every book, listened to every podcast, brewed every style. There might have been a brief moment when all of that was true. Then, I heard about this thing called the Cicerone Program. It was a true test of beer experts - you had to know the history, science, glassware, food pairing, etc. I began studying over lunch breaks, whipping out the books to read while eating. This caught the attention of a coworker who kept asking if I'd ever open a brewery. I told him that I'd dreamt of it, but realistically, no, I have bills to pay and who has the time? He started asking very specific questions about my dream brewery before one day asking if I'd join him and another partner in actually opening a brewery.
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I will leave out the specifics on the incredible amount of excitement and stress that comes with planning and opening a brewpub (it's a great way to lose weight and sleep!) We planned to open the same week in March 2020 that COVID-19 was declared an emergency and everything shut down. We took a step back and opened slowly on May 9th. Growth has been slow, but it has been growth nonetheless. Looking back almost 5 years later, the amount I've learned, and the scars, bruises, burns, and general stress have all been worth it.
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In May of 2024, John Deere started massive layoffs of salaried employees - something they hadn't done since the 1980s. In late July, my name was called. I had a few months to transition out and have spent my time since then focused on the brewery, and on learning new skills. I don't know what's next, but if you've made it this far, maybe you have something in mind...