Hi, I'm Steve!

I'm a person in Kalamazoo, MI working as a frontend engineer. I used to be a public librarian and it was in that setting that I built my first products for others to use. I think that this background informs all the digital work I do for the better.

Welcome, and a note about this site:

tldr; just making fun things for myself on the Build That Thing page without thinking too much about it.

I'm not sure what I want this site to be yet. I've been making digital things for other people for long enough that I lost sight what I want my own site to be, and why I even want my own site. While I've enjoyed building for others and learned a lot doing so, it did make it harder to figure out what I wanted to build for myself. That led to this space going offline for longer than I wanted, but I am itching to build for myself again. I used to have a fairly specific/campy aesthetic, as evidenced by the gif below of my previous portfolio site:

I liked that site because it was fun for me to make and it was fun for visitors to make (and download!) their own emoji art. But that doesn't speak to me anymore, and I'm still not sure what does. So maybe the goal here is to make things purely for fun without feeling like I need to make the entire site pixel perfect (which is what I do everyday at work). I think that once I allow myself to just make things for fun again, the shape this site is to take will make more sense. If not, then at least I will have had a bit of fun.