About

I have spent most of my adult life trying to understand why things work the way they do.

Sometimes the thing was an inventory system. Sometimes it was a piece of software, a pricing model, a solar project, a business, a family, or a room full of people who didn't agree on what was actually happening.

I seem to have an instinct for wandering into complicated systems and trying to make them simpler.

That has led to a somewhat difficult-to-explain career.

I studied mechanical engineering, but spent most of my professional life in wholesale distribution—the decidedly unglamorous art and science of moving boxes from one place to another. I have worked in warehouses, driven delivery trucks, managed inventory, written pricing systems, owned part of a distribution company, built software, sold solar projects, written grants, managed people, started companies, and occasionally wondered how any of this became my job.

Along the way, I married my best friend and we raised five children together. I also discovered that I like writing almost as much as I like solving problems.

Slow Essays is where those two interests meet.

This isn't a blog about one industry. It isn't really a business blog either. I expect to write about business, software, systems, technology, work, faith, family, human behavior, (re)distribution, entrepreneurship, and whatever else I cannot stop thinking about.

The name is intentional.

The internet rewards immediate reactions. I am increasingly interested in the opposite: ideas that have been allowed to sit for a while, collide with experience, survive a few objections, and become something worth writing about.

I don't promise that every essay will reach that standard.

But that's what I'm trying to do here.