🤦‍♂️ Failures 💡 Learnings 💌 Weekly Letters 🌧 Depression 📚 Courses & Books 🥰 Subscribe

I fail. A lot.

It's taken me a long time to work out, but I am not a personal brand.

I'm a person.

And to me, the difference between the two is failure. So often, in our instagram-ified world, we only present the very best, most flawless versions of ourselves. Cleaned up. dusted off. Confident and perfect and beautiful.

But I'm not really that way. And I suspect you aren't either. So here, in their full glory, are the things I've tried - including the ones I've failed at. :)

2024

Photography Videos

I've been struggling to figure out how to put my photography in the world. But these videos really strike a chord for me.

The Change Monsters

The monsters finally get their time to shine. :) Look, I only get to live once. I'm going to figure out how to a living doing things I love that make the world a better place.

Come back to writing publicly.

I took time to heal, and am giving this "write things and put them in the world" thing another go.

2023

Restart my photography practice.

The first art I ever learned was photography, and it was my main form of expression in my 20's. It was time to get it back.

Put down roots.

I moved back to a place not far from where I'd been born, hoping I could magically put down real roots for once. Found out that after a lifetime of moving, it's not that simple.

2022

I've made music for years of my life, but none of them recently. It was time to try again.

Restart nomad life.

Get down to two suitcases, and get on a plane. Figure it out, again.

Navigate divorce with kindness.

Love doesn't have to turn into bitterness. It can remain, can become something different, in the letting go.

2021

I wanted to see Aotearoa New Zealand, and pursue having new experiences. So, um, #vanlife?

Make a living as a writer.

I've been a struggling artist for years. This year, I figure out how to make it work.

2020

The 7-Day Sprint (again)

Rocket-boots for getting unstuck, or getting a project moving.

Starting a Patreon

I was hoping to help pay the bills as a writer. I found an amazing community. ❤️

Surviving Covid-19

Look, if you make it through, that's something.

Adding another dimension or two to the storytelling in the letters.

2019

Success! Just not how I'd imagined.

An open-source publishing, email, and product platform with ethics.

A weekly series from around the world, turned art.

2018

Turning Will into a platform and a business.

An exploration of what AI can mean for Art.

Giving Talks about Depression

Turning The No-Bullshit Guide into an in-person talk. In front of real people.

2017

Will, reborn for today's world, with Slack, personal AI support and more.

Failed!

Moving to New Zealand

After years of being a nomad, I'm attempting to put down some roots.

Failed!

7-Day Sprint

A kick-start course for getting big projects rolling.

2016

Success!

The No-Bullshit Guide to Depression

A friendly, no-fluff guide to what we know about dealing with depression.

Success!

Two-Year Life Plan Masterclass

An online course on making a life plan, and going after your dreams.

Ink and Feet Press

A small publishing company, with an amazing poet.

Give a TEDx Talk

It was one of the coolest feelings of my life to stand on that little red circle, even on the small stage of LACC.

2015

Lived a full life, died of old age.

Coaching

Serving as a coach for some amazing, world-changing people.

Success!

Inkblock

Simple publication and promotion for writers, not bloggers.

The Change Monsters

A four-week course to take on your biggest life goals, and learn awesome life skills along the way.

Polytester is a simple multi-language test runner.

2014

Failed!

Footprints

A simple, beautiful publication platform.

Writing Essays. Or Blog Posts.

Rather by accident, started writing essays about travel, culture, and what it means to be human.

Success!

Living Internationally

Sold everything, bought a one-way ticket, and took a chance on falling in love with the whole world.

A publishing company, of sorts.

Mindful Browsing

A chrome app to beautifully interrupt mindless browsing, and get you back to life.

Proper search-engine crawling on your angular/famous/js/etc django app. Built in the Greenkahuna Skunkworks.

Lived a full life, died of old age.

The simplest way to see if a bunch of data is related. Built in the GreenKahuna Skunkworks.

An online place for poetry. Disrupting the elitist, bullshit poetry journal industry.

Science for Humans

Turning dry, hard-to-read journal articles into quick, funny animated videos.

A place for conversation and ideas. Made so that intellectual discourse between far-away friends can flourish.

My personal incarnation of Will, who keeps an eye on how many beers I drink, my home's temperature, my fluid loss from a run, and reminds me of my big goals. I love will so much.

2013

The most friendly, easy-to-teach chat bot you've ever used.

A living sculptural piece, about touch.

Autoscalebot, the company

A software-as-a-service that automatically scales your heroku apps.

An awesome table

Sometimes I make furniture I'm proud of. Like this table.

2012

Lived a full life, died of old age.

You're in Portland. It's raining. Where is the nearest sun? Where is the nearest snow? Built at Wieden+Kennedy.

My Portland Schools

A facebook app connecting the greater Portland community to their schools.

Lived a full life, died of old age.

Zombie Translator

There was no reliable way to convert english to zombish in python. This project changed everything. Built at Wieden+Kennedy.

The Steven Manual

An intelligent book-of-sorts that keeps an eye on my life, pings me when I'm getting off-course, reminds me of emotional insights, and enforces the habits I want to cultivate.

An experimental piece of digital poetry about time, flowers, death and beauty. Which, really, are all the same thing.

Failed!

togetheralone

An experiment in community, with Anastasia Aizman.

Lived a full life, died of old age.

Autoscalebot, the project.

An open-source robot that automatically scales your heroku apps. Built at Wieden+Kennedy.

Lived a full life, died of old age.

The Digital Executioner

Viral web marketing campaign generator. Won the internet for a day. Built at Wieden+Kennedy.

A python library for writing easy-to-read behavior-driven tests than run in web browsers. Built at Wieden+Kennedy, and open-sourced.

2011

Lived a full life, died of old age.

A one-key app for sending yourself an email.

A digital crowd-poem: what does love mean to you?

A monthly art series, based in Portland, OR. An anti-museum.

Lived a full life, died of old age.

A library for integrating the stripe billing service into django apps. Came out of GoodCloud.

Lived a full life, died of old age.

Django Longer Username

Django had an annoying username problem. This project fixed it, for many, many people. Eventually replaced by another coder's forked project, django-longer-username-and-email. Came out of GoodCloud.

Django Ajax Uploader

Solving the problem of ajax upload to django, once and for all. Came out of GoodCloud.

Django Better-500s

Making error pages more friendly for users, and more useful for developers. Came out of GoodCloud.

2010

Contact, volunteer, and donor management software for small non-profits. Organizations loved it, but we couldn't grow fast enough to pay the bills.

30 people, 30 minutes

I turned 30 by spending the day talking to 30 people for 30 minutes each. This website has this highlights.

2009

Writing poetry seriously

Started over, learning how to be a reader. Eventually wrote a things I was proud to put my name on.

Volunteering with Write Around Portland

I'm lucky to be a volunteer, sustaining donor, and workshop facilitator for this amazing organization. Write Around Portland provides free creative writing workshops to people all across our community who can really use them.

2008

Tried to save the world, with Jeff Gunther. Sixlinks was the big picture of the world's sustainability issues, and step-by-step guides of actions you can personally take.

2007

Success!

Home

A coffee-table photo book about the desert, development, and home.

2006

College, part deux.

Spent the next 3 years at Cornell, got a degree. Never used it after I graduated. However, the now-laminated diploma works really nicely as a placeholder for the best dog in the world's food.

A flexible to-do list for balancing multiple projects and interleaved timelines. Worked great for me, but not really anyone else.

2005

Lived a full life, died of old age.

A photo gallery application, in PHP. With documentation!

Lived a full life, died of old age.

An application and set of photoshop actions for developing RAW camera files

Lived a full life, died of old age.

But I'm hungry!

My recipe and restaurant review site, in the day before there was a yelp or recipezaar.

Lived a full life, died of old age.

A couple of years of a semi-serious foray into digital photography

2004

Lived a full life, died of old age.

Branch Leaf Idea

A blog on sustainability, how-tech-works, and musings on a bright green future.

2003

Lived a full life, died of old age.

Joint Count Project

An accessible joint-pain reporter that worked for patients with advanced arthritis, and generated doctor-friendly output. With Drs. Ann Sturley and Leslie Lenert, at UCSD.

Lived a full life, died of old age.

The leading framework for creating medical decision making instruments. With Dr. Leslie Lenert and Aditya Bansod, at UCSD.

An open-source framework for scientific journal creation, with Dr. Rainer Bussmann.

Lived a full life, died of old age.

The first installation of olorien, with Dr. Rainer Bussmann.

2002

Lived a full life, died of old age.

ebDB: The International Ethnobotany Database

A web-accessible database, intended to securely house all the world's ethnobotanical research. v1 succeeded, but v2 became my Second System Syndrome albatross, and 8 years later, ultimately failed. v3 lives on Zoho. With Drs. Rainer Bussman and Doug Sharon.

Success!

Honda E-Learning framework

Built an e-learning framework for Honda that beat out competing projects from 10 firms, and was used unchanged for 6 years - until the language changed, and I built them the a one. With YPG.

Lived a full life, died of old age.

Liquid Silver Zen

My pre-2006 personal site, which morphed through a few iterations. These were my early experiments in design and digital interaction.

2001

Flash Components

Open-source Macromedia Flash components for CPU detection, bandwidth detection, and console.

Failed!

Foundation Javascript, the Book

I wrote about half of this book for Wrox Press. Unfortunately, they mis-timed the schedule, and scrapped the book a couple months later when Javascript 2 came out.

1999

Quantum Imagery

The first company I really made my living on, Quantum Imagery was (mostly) a sole proprietorship that built all sorts of cool web stuff over the next 10 years.

Raising the world's best dog.

Got lucky on this one by picking the world's best dog out of the shelter lineup.

1998

Went to the Univerity of Arizona. GPA went: Fall: 4.0, Spring: 0.0, Summer: dropped out.

1997

Lived a full life, died of old age.

Though all my early drafts were lost in the hands of a high school English teacher, I did a fair bit of writing back here.

1996

Lived a full life, died of old age.

Steven's Computer Solutions

My first real company, mowing lawns aside. Everything from video card upgrades to web design to MS Word training.

1992

Lived a full life, died of old age.

Steven's Lawn Care

You need your lawn mowed? Don't want to do it yourself? I'd do a pretty passable job.