Founder / DRKNYT
I start with a problem, follow it across disciplines, and make something concrete enough to learn from.
My route into this work runs through financial services, entrepreneurship, and community leadership. Through DRKNYT, I develop products and client systems by connecting business questions with research and hands-on making.
When I was seven, my dad brought home a Macintosh and a tractor-feed dot-matrix printer. We went door to door, and I offered to design and print whatever the neighbors needed.
That connection between a screen and something useful in your hands is still part of my work. With TAGD PrintLab, I'm exploring how someone can print a usable first version at home instead of waiting for a physical pack to arrive.
I taught myself HTMLHyperText Markup Language: the elements that give a web page its structure and meaning. and scripting to customize my page. I wanted to change what the platform gave me, so I learned enough to try.
The same curiosity now carries into my work with OpenAI, Next.js, React, Supabase, Vercel, Cloudflare, and Mux. The tools have changed; the habit remains: learn how something works, make it useful, and test what happens when someone uses it.
Leadership in my homeowners association led me to build meadowbrookhills.com. A practical organizational need became my bridge into serious web development.
That experience connects to client work like Constitution Kids and the stewardship questions in Save Georgian Bay: whose needs shape the work, who will maintain it, and who can question or correct it? The organization's responsibilities matter as much as the interface.
These reflections describe experiments and earlier stages. The current work directory carries the latest project descriptions and availability.
HomeHub / Emerging concept
Mortgage work gave me firsthand exposure to the documents and professional relationships assembled around a home purchase. HomeHub asks what happens afterward, when the owner still needs those records and relationships.
I think of it as the modern fridge magnet: a professional relationship sustained by something useful. HomeHub explores a persistent home record, with TAGD as a proposed connection to physical objects and places.
The commercial model remains a hypothesis. Household use and professional willingness to pay still need testing.
TAGD + PrintLab / Product experiment
While building TAGD's store, I was exploring whether a sticker pack could justify roughly $50. I could imagine paying for it, but I wouldn't want to wait days to use it. That personal observation led me through local inventory, courier delivery, and distributed production concepts.
The idea for PrintLab arrived while I was printing scan-test sheets: a customer with a suitable printer could make the first usable version. I focused on customer printing as the next direction to test, separating immediate utility from premium physical fulfillment.
Print and scan testing informed the direction. Customer usability, conversion, and revenue remain unvalidated; the fulfillment concepts were not retailer partnerships.
Save Georgian Bay / Ongoing research
I entered this work without the domain experience I brought to homeownership. Storytelling raised questions about consent, stewardship, and credibility. Storyline prototypes let me work through a proposed contribution process, including private drafts, review, correction, and removal.
That inquiry contributed to the developing Bay Standard approach: organizing claims, sources, and uncertainty to support Save Georgian Bay's work. Making changed what I needed to research.
A bounded, approved pilot is a proposed next step. Community, environmental, and advocacy outcomes are not yet established.
Constitution Kids / Client work · Local implementation
Client work asks me to connect what I can build with what an organization needs. In the local implementation, “Customize this lesson” leads into a Teacher Kit builder, exploring how teachers could adapt existing content into writing, vocabulary, and assessment activities.
The work also includes the administration behind the experience: teacher lead review, content management, and reporting. The next test is a complete teacher journey, including where assistance is needed.
Local implementation provides something concrete to review. Teacher adoption, learning gains, and commercial impact are not established.
Financial services taught me about consequential decisions, regulated environments, and the information people need to act. Building businesses and serving community organizations gave me other ways to understand what makes a service useful.
As a Logistics Analyst at TradeBeam, I investigated software bugs, diagnosed problems, developed training manuals, and maintained a self-learning website.
Between TradeBeam and Quicken Loans, I was self-employed as DJ BUCKWILD and ran my independent record label, Smell Good Records. I also founded the Detroit Kickball Association.
Education
Albion College and Henry Ford Community College.
At the Farmington chapter of the Michigan Jaycees, I served as Secretary, Treasurer, President, and Chairperson.
I served on the Greater Farmington Area Chamber of Commerce board and in a board role with the Women's Council of Realtors, 275 Corridor.
At Meadowbrook Hills HOA, I served as Secretary, Treasurer, and President, including two years as President.
I use artificial intelligence to research, synthesize, explore alternatives, and build prototypes. I remain responsible for deciding which questions matter, checking consequential claims, and determining what the work is ready to support. An attractive output can still conceal an untested assumption.
I preserve source material and transformation history, check important claims against their sources, and distinguish a concept, a prototype, a working flow, and a validated outcome. The loop is simple: observe, question, research, synthesize, make, test, revise.
The more technology lets me do, the more carefully I need to decide what it should do. These principles reflect DRKNYT's public draft policies on responsible AIArtificial intelligence: software that produces or interprets material from patterns in data.Open the source , responsible human judgment, representation, and accessibilityMaking information and controls usable by people with different abilities and ways of interacting.Open the source .
A fluent artificial intelligence response or a convincing demo is not proof. I distinguish what was observed, what someone reported, what I infer, and what remains uncertain. Consequential claims need sources; claims that an action succeeded need confirmation from the system responsible.
I remain accountable for the tools I choose and the actions I authorize. Review should give someone enough information, time, and authority to question, pause, or change the work. Responsibility cannot disappear into a model, a vendor, or an approval button.
I want the work to reflect the people and families who already exist, including people historically left out of the picture. That means considering who is centered, who decides, and who is shown with expertise and agency. Generated imagery should be disclosed where it could mislead, and real people's identities should be preserved.
Clear language, readable contrastThe measurable brightness difference between foreground information and its background., keyboard access, useful image descriptions, and support for different devices and reduced motionA device preference asking interfaces to limit nonessential movement and animation. belong in the work from the start. Automated checks help, but they do not prove an experience works for everyone.
Privacy and consent run through all of this: use only the information a task needs, keep private material private, and separate a preview from permission to send, publish, charge, or change something in the world.
These are commitments and continuing work, not a claim that every prototype already meets them. I want people to be able to question the work, identify a barrier, and help correct the record.
Working principle
The distributed-production thinking around TAGD helped inform DoorPing. Branded packs suggested a possible professional-sponsored route into HomeHub. An idea can be wrong for its first problem and still offer something worth investigating elsewhere.
I found the formal language of business design after learning much of this through practice. I value working with people who bring different experience, challenge my assumptions, and help make the next decision more rigorous.
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