Roasting
Coffee, from green to cup
Chasing the sweet spot between first and second crack. Logging every batch (charge temp, development time, taste notes) until the curve is repeatable.
charge198°C
first crack9:15
dev ratio21%
Veteran · Builder · Roaster · Brewer · Cook
I learn things by making them.
Coffee I roast myself. Beer and wine I brew in the garage. Food from scratch. Web apps and AI models I build to figure out how they actually work, and a quiet conviction that no one should go through the hard stuff alone.
roast batches40+
litres brewed30K+
things shipped30+
still learning∞
01
The short version
Maker by obsession. Perpetual beginner on purpose.I'm happiest with my hands in something new: a green coffee I've never roasted, a beer style I've never fermented, a codebase I don't yet understand. The through-line isn't coffee or code. It's the loop: try, measure, taste, adjust, repeat.
Twenty-nine years of service taught me the value of preparing well and showing up for people when it counts, work I carry on today in emergency management with Ally. That same instinct runs under everything here: get ready, pay attention, look after each other.
The rest of the loop runs through software and AI as much as the kitchen, building small web apps and poking at language models to learn how the magic actually works. Same craft, different heat source.
- Based
- Comox Valley, BC
- Service
- 29 years
- Now
- Emergency mgmt @ Ally
- Makes
- Coffee · Beer · Wine · Food · Software
- Learning
- LLMs · Full-stack
- Cares about
- Men's mental health
02
The Craft Log
Everything here is something I'm still getting better at.Brewing
Beer & wine in the garage
Grain to glass, and fruit to bottle. Hazy IPAs, the odd cold-weather stout, and a blueberry wine made from berries I picked myself. Reading gravity, babysitting fermentation temps, and learning that patience is the main ingredient.
og1.100
fg1.002
ferment24°C
abv12.86%
Kitchen
DIY food & ferments
Bread, hot sauce, pickles, the occasional cure. If it can be made from scratch instead of bought, I'd rather learn how, and probably overthink it the first three times.
starterday 40+
hydration75%
fermentwild
Software
Web apps, shipped
Full-stack side projects: the kind you build because you want the thing to exist. Tools for real people, learned by getting them live instead of just reading the docs.
stackTS / node
deploysself-host
statuslive
AI / LLM
Models, up close
Running, fine-tuning, and orchestrating language models on my own hardware to understand them from the inside, not as a black box, but as something you can take apart.
runs onlocal GPU
methodhands-on
goalunderstand
03
You Are Not Alone
The reason behind a lot of it.After the service years, and somewhere between the roasts and the code, I got serious about men's mental health, and about building things that help people feel a little less alone.
The crafts on this page aren't just hobbies. Making something with your hands, showing up for a batch, having a reason to talk to another person over a cup or a pint: that's quiet, ordinary medicine. It kept me steady, and I think it can do that for others too.
So I put the building toward it: YANA (You Are Not Alone), the software, the volunteering, the small tools that help people reach out before things get heavy.