I retired from The Walt Disney Company at the end of October. Depending on how you count, I’ve been doing this for either 32 years (1993, webmaster at a community college, $4.25/hour) or 31 (1994, web designer at one of the many local ISPs that popped up everywhere that year).
The first decade was pure dotcom chaos. I worked at one ISP, moved to a second, co-founded a third, then rode the startup wave from Phoenix to Seattle. At one point acquisitions were happening so fast that I sat at the same desk for three and a half years but worked for five different companies! I did consulting for a while, sold that business, and in 2005 joined Microsoft.
Microsoft was a revelation. Back then, if you were curious about something, you could just look at the source. Windows XP? Go look. OneNote inking? Right there. I was a kid in a candy store. More importantly, I’d always been one of the stronger engineers I knew—unaware that was a factor of pond size, not fish size. Suddenly I was surrounded by people an order of magnitude smarter than me. I loved every minute. Breach response, standards body work, a stint on Xbox working on optical disc formats. I learned SO much and made many lifetime friends.
I left Microsoft the week of my five-year anniversary. (I tend to think and plan in five-year increment, always have.)
Adobe lured me with a pitch from my friend Florian: Remember what we did with 100 people at Microsoft? Let’s do it at Adobe with 10. Where Microsoft was competitive and combative, Adobe was collegiate and kind. I started in the Primetime video team, building up the Adobe Primetime Access business from zero and eventually owning the Primetime VR/AR strategy before I transitioned over to a role in the Experience Cloud team where my product team owned the Experience Cloud ID (ECID) and built the identity graph systems that tied the whole suite together.
I left Adobe the week of my ten-year anniversary. Two 5-year increments. I’m nothing if not consistent.
iDuring the pandemic, I started Virtual Neural and alongside my friend Scott Nebeker we built telemetry hardware prototypes, played with VR cameras, and sent them out on racetracks and in aerobatic planes. We cracked the top 15 out of over 1,000 startups competing for spots the Comcast SportTech accelerator. We accidentally invented an early but promising approach to adding 6DOF-for-comfort to spherical photos. We got to pitch to companies nobody gets in the door to talk to. We spent essentially nothing, had a blast, and learned a ton from each other. Rachel and I took a year off and toured the country: a month in a cabin in the Blue Ridge mountains, a month in Florida beach houses, and a few months falling in love again with Payson, Arizona (a place I’d loved since childhood.)
I was lying in a hammock at a cabin in Rim Country when my friend Rick called and said Disney needed some help. Virtual Neural went from pause to stop, and I took my dream job as Director of Software Engineering at Disney Streaming. I spent three and a half years there, building a ground-up rewrite of their native player in Rust and C++, shipping it across platforms and services including Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN. I had an incredible team of deep, low-level engineers. Interesting problems closer to the metal than most people get to play these days. In late 2025, the opportunity came to take an early retirement, and now Rachel and I are headed back to Payson.
Virtual Neural, the Sabbatical, and Disney together came to about 6 months over five years. Close enough.
I had such a great time. I got to work with brilliant people and build deep technology. It was a tremendous privilege, and I’m grateful for every opportunity.
Now for my next challenge: learning how to NOT work 80 hours a week. Thanks to everyone I’ve worked with over the years. I couldn’t have asked for a more enjoyable career. And now I can maybe take the blog out of archival mothballs and get back to my previous feverish posting pace of one post every 6-18 months.