Oh man, you must have googled me or met me or something and now you want to know more about me... this seems like a good place for you to get started.
Hi, I'm Carter.
I'm a nerd in so many ways. Hobbies and interests have a way of taking me like a rip tide. I'm a go big or go home kind of guy so I don't like to dabble... I like to dive right in.
My first real interest was computers. My first computer was a mysterious Kaypro II. I think my dad bought it for taxes at some point in the 80s, but as a very young child it was a mysterious box that my dad hardly knew how to use. Sometime around age 7 my grandpa taught me how to run some of the games included on floppy disks (5 1/4"... the real floppies) and I was immediately hooked. I vaguely remember buying a Programming BASIC book from some discount bargain store and immediately and perhaps unsuccessfully tried typing the games into it.
Flash forward two and a half decades and I'm still fascinated by these machines. Since then I've made a living out of building amazing web & mobile apps for people. I still love it like a curious 7 year old. It's been a long crazy ride from BASIC to HTML to CSS to PHP to Java to Python to Rails to Elixir to React (& React Native). I think what I love most about being a software developer is that I'm always learning something new.
I think life would be dull if computers were my only love. That'd make me a huge nerd and I like to put my eggs in more than one basket. If I was full of myself maybe I'd call myself a renaissance man but maybe it's best to say I'm a jack of all trades, master of none... that's where my hobbies come in.
At age 13, I started taking piano lessons. I had an amazing piano teacher that not only taught me how to read the treble and bass clef but she also taught me how to fake or jam or improvise if you will. I think the real fun started when I stopped taking lessons and just started playing for fun. In 2007, I joined my first band, The Neo-Nostalgics. Oh boy, did I get hooked. Fast forward 12 years to now and I'm organizing a music festival and have played in almost every genre from surf rock to jug band to Dead covers to reggae to funk. My day isn't complete until I've at least sat down at the piano for a few minutes to tickle those keys.
I live in Wyoming. It's one of those seemingly boring unpopulated states that's shaped like a rectangle. That's great for me because it makes it easy to find solitude in the amazing mountains we have here. I love hiking, running, hunting, backpacking, skiing, biking, and boating through the amazing wild places of Wyoming. It's a big part of my life and the way I feel about the wilderness is probably the closest thing I have to religion.
While I love my home and exploring the mountains of Wyoming, I also love exploring the rest of the world. I took 6 months out of 2014 to travel the world and bounced around from Thailand to Cambodia to India to Nepal to Peru. I got hooked and since then I've also been to Laos, Vietnam, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Scotland, France, Switzerland, Italy, and the Netherlands. It's a big old world out there and I love discovering the remarkable differences and the equally remarkable similarities we have as people.
Back to the nerdy stuff... in 2015, I became NS7I (after a brief stint as KG7TAW), an extra class amateur radio operator (aka ham). I've had so much fun learning about this quirky little hobby where you buy (or build) radios for the sake of communicating with people all around... to talk to them about radios. For what seems like a straightforward hobby, it's so multi faceted and it offers a lifetime of learning.
Over the last few years, I've fallen in love with running (and biking and swimming). In 2017, I casually started running. In 2018, I trained for and completed a half iron triathlon (2000m swim/56 mile bike/13.1 mile run). Lately my love has been trail running through the mountains of Wyoming (or wherever I'm traveling).
But really my latest, greatest, and most rewarding interest has been raising my son that was born earlier in 2019. It's been so amazing to see him evolve and to experience the true adventure of parenthood.
I can't wait to see what the coming years will bring!