I graduated from RPI in 2007 with a BS in Computer Science and Psychology. For the next thirteen years I wrote software — fintech at FactSet, healthcare technology at Healthify and IBM Watson Health, telephony at DialogTech, media at American Greetings. Real jobs with real code. The gaps in my foundation were real too, even if I couldn't see them clearly at the time.
In 2020, I stepped back. Not by choice in the triumphant sense — more in the 'something wasn't working and couldn't keep working' sense. I have ADHD and I'm bipolar. I'd been managing both and managing the job and the rest of it, and then those things stopped being compatible with each other. So I stopped.
What followed was a few years of being mostly invisible to the industry. A lot of reading. Architecture documents for platforms that didn't exist yet. I kept circling back to the same problem: I'd learned software by doing it, and the foundation had real gaps. The kind you don't notice until you're trying to design something at scale and you realize you're working from intuition where you should be working from understanding.
I tried to fill the gaps. Every online resource either assumed I already had the mathematical background or treated me like I was starting from zero and wasted my time on things I already knew. None of them accounted for the way my brain works: following a thread forty pages deep until something interrupts, then losing it completely. Needing a concrete example before a formal definition means anything. Needing to understand why something exists before I can remember that it does.
I also kept noticing something else: the people I most wanted to learn from were researchers, not instructors. The knowledge lived in papers, not in courses. And the path from 'I work in software' to 'I understand the research' was supposed to go through a graduate program I couldn't attend.
I needed something that didn't exist. So I started building it.
Hearth & Code started as a self-directed curriculum — sixty-seven modules, structured like a doctoral research program in Applied AI. It grew from there: if this was what I needed, probably other people needed something like it too. People who can't afford the institution. Who learn differently. Who are trying to get back in after a break, or in for the first time without the traditional path. The platform is still being built. The curriculum is already open source.
There's a risk someone will see what I'm building here and build it first, better, with more funding. I've thought about it. I'm at peace with it. The value isn't in the idea — it's in the work, the community, and the people who show up. If someone else ships a better version faster, I hope they do. We need this thing to exist.
The other reason to build in public: it's the only accountability structure available to me right now. The moment I stop writing about what I'm doing and why, it becomes easy to pretend progress isn't necessary. Writing keeps that honest.
"The obligation of the people who know is to teach. That's older than universities. That's what this is."
You might be here because you read something I wrote, or because you're trying to figure out the same things I'm trying to figure out, or because you're building your own version of this and wanted to see how someone else is doing it.