I'm a developer, dad, chronic overthinker, and the kind of person who can turn “this could be cool” into three days of work.
the guy behind all this →yeah, that's me.
Mostly, I just really like making things.
Websites, little tools, side projects, dumb experiments, overly complicated solutions to problems that probably didn't need solving in the first place. There's something about having an idea in my head and slowly turning it into a real thing that never really gets old.
I've been like that for as long as I can remember. The specific obsession changes. Sometimes it's code. Sometimes it's a game. Sometimes it's redesigning something that was perfectly functional twenty minutes earlier because I suddenly decided I could make it better.
I have a bad habit of getting curious about something and then needing to understand how the whole damn thing works.
That's probably how I ended up in software development.
I didn't grow up with some master plan to become a software engineer. My path here has been considerably messier than that. I've worked restaurants, warehouses, retail, delivery gigs, and plenty of other normal jobs while trying to figure out what the hell I actually wanted to do.
Eventually I stopped treating the stuff I built on computers as just something I did on the side and decided to take it seriously.
This site is basically where all of that gets to live together.
I didn't want another personal site that only showed the clean, finished, professional version of me. That's useful for a résumé. It's boring as hell as a personal website.
I wanted somewhere I could put a finished project next to a half-baked idea, write something when I actually have something to say, document what I'm learning, talk about a game I've played for half my life, and generally make the kind of website that feels like an actual person lives here.
So yeah, it might get a little all over the place. Fuck it. So am I.
02
Turns out the important stuff isn't on a screen.
I'm a dad and a fiancé before I'm a developer or anything else that goes on a résumé.
Becoming a dad changed me in ways I'm probably still figuring out. The future used to feel like this abstract thing I'd eventually get around to. Now there's a little person watching me build a life in real time, and that changes the weight of pretty much everything.
I want my son to grow up seeing that it's okay to be curious, change direction, make weird things, suck at something for a while, and keep figuring yourself out as you go.
I'm still very much figuring myself out as I go, for the record.
When I'm not doing family stuff or staring at VS Code, there's a good chance I'm playing something, learning about some completely unrelated subject I suddenly need to know everything about, or starting another project despite having several perfectly good unfinished ones already.
I like games in general, technology, design, AI, making things, learning random shit for no practical reason whatsoever, and the strange little corners of the internet where people still make things because they want them to exist.
Things I keep coming back to
Web developmentRuneScapeGamesDesignAIBuilding thingsRandom rabbit holesPersonal websitesLearning new shitTrying ideas
03 / Misc.
A few things that explain a lot.
!!
01
I will absolutely turn a two-hour project into a two-week project if the complicated version sounds more interesting.
02
Becoming a dad changed the way I think about pretty much everything.
03
I have significantly more ideas than time, money, or common sense required to build them.
04
I can get interested in almost anything if you give me twenty minutes and a good rabbit hole.
05
I've managed restaurants, unloaded trucks, worked warehouses, delivered groceries, and somehow ended up writing TypeScript.
06
I think the internet was better when people made weird little websites just because they could.
04
I took the scenic route.
apparently careers don't need a straight line.
I didn't start my career in tech.
I spent years in restaurants and eventually became a general manager. I've worked retail, fulfillment, warehouses, delivery gigs, and jobs where the main objective was simply: there is a pile of shit that needs done, so figure out how to get it done.
For a long time, software was the thing I kept circling back to rather than the thing I was willing to call a career.
Looking back, I don't really see those other years as wasted time. Managing people taught me more about communication and leadership than a programming class ever could. Customer service taught me that the technically correct answer isn't always the useful one. Working in places where something actually has to get done taught me to care a lot more about whether a solution works than whether it's clever.
Eventually I went back to school for computer science and decided to see what happened if I actually committed to the thing I kept coming back to.
Turns out I really fucking like it.
Probably should've figured that one out sooner.
05
So what am I doing now?
School
Finishing the degree.
I'm finishing my bachelor's degree in Computer Science with a concentration in Software Engineering.
Going back to school as an adult, while life is already very much happening, has been a different experience than I would've had at eighteen. I'm not there because somebody told me college is the next step. I'm there because I know why I want to learn this stuff.
Building
Making real things.
School is part of it, but I learn the most when I have an actual problem in front of me and no choice but to figure it out.
That's why I keep building outside of class: websites, tools, experiments, the RuneScape POH Planner, this site, and whatever questionable idea I convince myself should exist next.
Arnett Digital
Trying to build something of my own.
Arnett Digital is my attempt to turn the skills I've spent years developing into a real business helping small businesses with websites, hosting, SEO, automation, and other practical digital work.
It's still early. I'm still figuring it out. That's exactly why I'm excited about it.
06
Okay, fine. The professional stuff.
I work mostly around software and the web: websites, applications, tools, interfaces, and solving interesting problems with code.
I'm especially drawn to projects where I get to think about both sides of the problem — how something works underneath and how it feels to the person actually using it.
I care about performance, maintainability, design that has some actual personality, and building things that solve the problem without dragging in fifteen layers of unnecessary complexity.
Although, if it's one of my own side projects, I reserve the right to ignore that last sentence completely.
If you're here because you're thinking about hiring me, collaborating on something, need a website, saw something I built, or just want to talk about some weird idea — cool. Say hi.
