I'm a creative technologist. That spans from basic tech and design tasks to "mad scientist" experimentation at the edge of what the tools can currently do. Thirty years of it, across Atlanta, New York, İstanbul, and now Columbus, Ohio.

Most of those years were inside the kind of organizations that hire people like me to make things look modern: Apple, BBDO Worldwide, Accenture. I built digital products and services for some of the most recognizable brands in the world and rode through every major platform shift of the internet age.

My story

In the spring of 2016 I was riding the 559C bus from Beşiktaş to Kabataş most evenings after work, watching the city slide past as the sky over the European side of İstanbul turned from blue to pink-amber. The project I was on was technically interesting (they always were). I'd stopped being able to justify it. It wasn't a thunderclap. It accumulated. It sat in the background of my thinking while I went to meetings and reviewed wireframes and took the bus home, and one evening the weight of it became specific enough to name.

I didn't have a plan. I didn't know I was about to quit. I just knew that the distance between the work on my desk and the world outside the bus window had become too large to ignore.

I resigned from my job a few weeks later, eventually came back to Ohio, and started a small studio. I named it Five59 Labs after the bus line because I wanted to remember where the question started. The mission was deliberately simple: humanize stories that drive positive change. Use the technical and creative skills I'd spent twenty years developing, but point them at work that proved a human being was behind it, and that the human being gave a damn.