I design it
and I build it.

The Mad Scientist is a tube compressor that doesn't pretend to be something it isn't. The steampunk hardware aesthetic - riveted copper plate, vacuum tubes, hand-machined fittings, amber-glow VU meters - was not a marketing decision. It was the answer to a design question: what would this hardware look like if a Victorian engineer had built it for a modern studio? The result belongs in a museum and works in a mix simultaneously.

The controls are dense because the plugin is dense. Gain, threshold, attack, release, knee, auto-release, mix, output, and mode - all visible, nothing hidden behind menus. TUBE COMPRESSOR is the subtitle. The character is the point. Most engineers who put this on a buss track for the first time leave it there permanently.

The GUI was designed so that everything a compressor engineer needs is immediately readable without clicking anything. The two large VU meters dominate the panel because in tube compression, watching the meters IS the process - the attack of the needle, the hang time on release, the point at which the gain reduction starts to feel musical rather than corrective. All of that is visible at a glance. At $39 it costs less than the breakfast you ate before the session.

The visual identity for M Media Audio was built around one principle: the work should look as serious as it sounds.

The palette uses near-black backgrounds, warm amber accents, and tight system typography, deliberately avoiding the overused neon synth-wave look common in audio software. The mmediaaudio.com site is a fully custom WordPress theme, with every layout, component, and CSS rule written from scratch. The result feels more editorial and hardware-focused than typical plugin marketing, closer to premium product presentation than disposable software promotion.

The three plugin GUIs use photorealistic rack hardware styling, designed to feel like equipment that has lived in a real studio. Aged dark metal, parchment VU meters, authentic markings, red zones, worn surfaces, amber LEDs, and consistent wordmark placement create a unified product family while allowing each plugin to stand apart. Alternate Timeline is the most complex interface, with ERA selection, input metering, dual VU meters, saturation indication, bypass, and a full row of hardware-style controls arranged with real-world ergonomics in mind. Speaker Breaker and Velvet Crush are intentionally minimal, using a power toggle, Mix knob, VU meters, and a clear OVERLOAD indicator to communicate their purpose immediately.

The marketing system extends the same visual language across hero images, product screenshots, compatibility logos, trust badges, article cards, WooCommerce templates, FAQ sections, and mobile layouts. Eighteen SVG DAW and technology logos were assembled and styled for the compatibility scroller. The site also includes custom-built UI components such as a touch-enabled auto-advancing slider, plugin grid cards, checkout templates, and trust bands, all designed without page builders, grid libraries, or front-end frameworks.

The question the enterprise AI market cannot currently answer is: what did the agent actually do, and can you prove it?

The Agent Action Ledger is an AI governance daemon that answers that question. Every action taken by an AI agent - every API call, every capability invoked, every decision made and logged - is written to a hash-chained audit ledger that is mathematically tamper-evident and cannot be retroactively modified without detection. The chain runs SHA-256 across sequential entries. Bcrypt handles authorization. The daemon is MCP-native, integrating directly into the Model Context Protocol toolchain that serious AI agent deployments are standardizing on. No cloud. No relay. No SaaS subscription required to operate the tool you bought.

The governance problem in enterprise AI is not hypothetical. Regulated industries - finance, healthcare, federal procurement - require demonstrable audit trails for automated decision systems. General counsels want to know that if an AI agent took an action with business or legal consequences, that action is on record, timestamped, signed, and provably unaltered. Most existing solutions require sending audit data somewhere else. AALD keeps it where it belongs: inside your infrastructure, under your control, behind your security perimeter.

AALD ships as a single binary on Windows, Linux, and macOS at $999 per instance per year. The MCP adapter is open source, published under MIT, and serves as the top-of-funnel for organizations evaluating governance infrastructure before committing to the full deployment. The architecture was designed from the first commit for air-gapped operation - a decision that opens doors in federal, defense, and regulated-industry procurement that cloud-dependent competitors cannot enter.

M Media Audio - Custom WordPress Theme / UI/UX / WooCommerce

M Media Audio was designed as a polished portfolio and product storefront for professional audio software. The goal was to present three VST3 plugins, audio services, support resources, documentation, and e-commerce in one cohesive system without making the site feel like a generic WooCommerce install.

The visual direction uses a restrained dark interface, near-black surfaces, amber accents, Apple-style spacing, system typography, and large cinematic product imagery. The result is a premium audio brand that feels closer to high-end studio hardware than a typical plugin sales page.

The site was built as a fully custom WordPress theme with no page builder, no CSS framework, and no block-editor layout dependency. I designed and implemented the component system, including the hero sections, plugin cards, animated compatibility logo rail, product slider, service sections, navigation, responsive layouts, and reusable dark/light section patterns.

Interactive elements were built with vanilla JavaScript, including the product slider, mobile navigation, swipe support, auto-advance behavior, conditional form sections, and accessibility states. The theme uses a single organized stylesheet and custom PHP templates throughout.

The site includes three purpose-built intake flows: a general contact form, a project-start form with conditional service fields, and a structured plugin support form collecting product, OS, DAW, license, version, issue details, and attachments. Forms use WordPress nonce validation, honeypot protection, private file handling, and email delivery without relying on third-party form services.

WooCommerce was integrated into the design system instead of left in its default state. Cart and checkout pages use custom templates, branded headers, checkout step indicators, trust messaging, custom table styling, matching form fields, and a continuous visual experience from product discovery through purchase.

The project demonstrates full-stack WordPress execution: information architecture, visual design, UI/UX, responsive front-end development, PHP templating, WooCommerce customization, form handling, product presentation, and performance-conscious JavaScript without unnecessary dependencies.

The 2014 Valukas Report - the independent investigation into GM's ignition switch crisis - documented how a single engineer approved a design fix for a defective switch but failed to assign a new part number, making the change invisible inside GM's own tracking systems.

The defect had been known for over a decade. One hundred and twenty-four people died. The part number was never updated. The internal systems were so poorly built that a safety-critical change could disappear into them without a trace. When GM hired me that same year to rebuild the UI layer of their global supplier management systems, the state of those interfaces was not a surprise. They looked like they were built by 3rd party software engineers who had never thought about the person on the other side of the screen. Because they were.

Over 60,000 global suppliers used these systems every day to manage quality, sourcing, and performance data at the scale of one of the largest manufacturers on earth. Legacy JSP with no design system, no component architecture, no coherent visual language, built erratically by third-party vendors over years with no continuity. The interfaces communicated nothing clearly and forgave nothing. That is not a UX complaint. At GM's scale, an interface that obscures information or creates ambiguity is an operational liability. The Valukas Report proved it.

Over nine years I rebuilt the entire UI layer. JSP gave way to Angular. Ad-hoc styling gave way to Angular Material. Then the work outgrew what Material provided - I designed and built custom components that extended the library well beyond its published spec, maintaining consistency and quality across three interconnected enterprise systems. Over my time there, I mentored over 40 developers and drove roughly 30% velocity improvement across the teams I worked with. That number is not an estimate; it was measured.

When GM stood up their Defense division on a classified platform, they ported the work. I do not hold a government security clearance - GM vouched for me directly. I cannot show screenshots of any of it. Some of the most significant work of my career exists behind an NDA and a classification level, which I will take as a compliment. The details are available in conversation.

Bill Ussery built guitar amplifiers the way the best ones have always been built - by hand, one at a time, for musicians who can hear the difference.

Austin Tone Lab's clientele included Eric Johnson and David Grissom, two of the most tonally demanding guitarists working. When you're making gear for players at that level, the brand has to carry the same weight as the product. A stock logo and a template site would have been an insult to the work.

The logo is a triangle - a shape that reads immediately as badge hardware, the kind of embossed metal plate bolted to the grille cloth of a serious amplifier. The ATL letterform inside it is tight and authoritative. Dark textured backgrounds reference cabinet tolex and speaker material. The silver metallic navigation buttons borrow their finish language from amp panel hardware. None of this is accidental - every visual decision was made to make the site feel like the product feels when you stand in front of one.

The full scope covered logo design, brand identity, wireframing, design, build, and hosting through M Media. Audio samples let the amps speak for themselves, and artist links connected visitors directly to the musicians using the gear - a credibility chain that worked because the names on it were real. Bill knew exactly what he was building. The job was to make sure the brand did too.

The Womb was not necessarily a public forum - it was more of an invitation-only community built around the idea that real knowledge in pro audio lived with the people who actually made the records, not on the sanitized boards where those conversations got watered down.

Mixerman (Eric Sarafin - gold and platinum mixer for The Pharcyde, Ben Harper, Lifehouse, Barenaked Ladies) had built a following through The Daily Adventures of Mixerman and his Zen series of books. Slipperman's legendary Recording Distorted Guitars From Hell had become required reading in heavy music circles. These were the anchors, but the room also included Bob Ohlsson, Ken Scott (the Beatles engineer), Ron Saint Germain, and a rotating cast of serious working engineers operating under aliases. I was crunch. The whole post-it notes design premise came from my wife Eli, who drew every visual element by hand on actual Post-it notes. I digitized the drawings, composed the collage header, and built the full system - art direction, graphic design, and sysadmin. That header is not a digital recreation of Post-it notes. It is Post-it notes - many were made.

It ran for years as the anti-Gearslutz - no corporate moderating, no gear company influence, no beginner apologetics - and it mattered in the industry in ways that didn't show up in Google results. When it eventually wound down and the community migrated elsewhere, it left a gap that nobody has quite filled. For me it was the rare project where the design concept was physically true: the medium was the message, and the medium was a stack of hand-drawn notes from someone who understood the room. We had so many laughs together. Long Live The Womb.

Austin Screen Printing had been an Austin institution since 1975 - born out of the back of Rooster Andrews, printing jerseys for UT and local sports teams before most of their competitors existed.

By the time we came on board they were the largest full-service screen printer in Austin and had grown to include embroidery and promotional products alongside their original trade. They had their own internal graphics department. We ignored that entirely and designed a site that treated them like the cultural institution they actually were. The palette is deep forest green and weathered khaki - Austin outdoors, not corporate print shop. The navigation buttons are styled like crosshair targets. The scroll ironwork in the sidebar pulls from the decorative Austin signage tradition. The full-width portfolio strip at the bottom showcased their real client list - SXSW, Austin Film Festival, South Congress - because the names were better than anything we could write. It outclassed their internal work by a significant margin, and they knew it.

The site handled artwork uploads, order status tracking, quote requests, a full client catalog organized by category, brand, and industry, and a mailing list system - all custom LAMP, all integrated, all running behind a design that made a print shop feel like a brand. They have since moved toward the generic "your logo on anything" model that commoditized the industry. For a few years though, they were the kings of screen printing in Austin, and the site looked exactly like that.

Some projects are business. This one was closer to a gift.

Dr. Adeola Faleye was building an orthodontic practice in Bartlett, Tennessee - a suburb of Memphis - with a clear and deliberate philosophy: everyone is welcome. Children, adolescents, adults, LGBTQ patients, every background. In Memphis, in that era, that was not the path of least resistance. It took courage to open a practice on those terms and mean it. The site had to communicate that warmth without making it a statement - the goal was a place that felt safe to walk into before a word was read. The multi-colored navigation bar was intentional. The hero image was intentional. The copy was intentional. None of it was accidental inclusion; it was a considered design position that said the same thing the doctor was saying with her practice.

The full scope covered branding, identity, and the complete website - Meet Dr. Faleye, staff pages, benefits of braces, patient education, FAQ, contact, and location, all organized for a patient who might be anxious about orthodontic care and needed the site to lower that anxiety before the first appointment.

NTEU Chapter 247 represents IRS employees in Austin, Texas - part of the National Treasury Employees Union, which covers 150,000 federal workers across 34 agencies and departments.

This one was essentially a gift. The site went out the door for pennies, and that was the point. What it gave back was something harder to bill for - a ground-level education in collective bargaining, how union chapters actually function, what federal employees deal with in a workplace that runs by a different set of rules than the private sector, and what it looks like when a group of people with very limited resources fight very hard for very basic things. Chapter 247 had a 70% dues-paying membership rate, which is a remarkable number and says everything about how much their members trusted the organization.

The site is still up, largely unchanged. That is either a testament to how well it held together or a sign that the chapter has had bigger things to worry about. Probably both. Not every project in a career is about the fee or the showcase. Some of them are about showing up for people who need it, learning something you couldn't have learned any other way, and doing the work right regardless.

Cuppa Joe Records was Dave Martin's boutique label, a companion to JavaJive Studio - the natural next step for a producer and engineer who spent 25 years recording music he believed in and eventually decided to release some of it himself. The label was deliberately genre-agnostic. The site copy says it plainly: "Cuppa Joe isn't a country label. Cuppa Joe Records chooses instead to release projects that we think are absolutely marvelous, without regards to how the music might be pigeonholed." That is a harder position to design for than a label with a defined sound, because the brand has to carry weight the genre can't.

The identity built on the coffee house metaphor fully - warm browns, black, and cream; a coffee cup mark with steam curling into the wordmark; mixed display and editorial typography. The site architecture covered news, artists, downloads, a store, and an MP3 listen section at a time when streaming wasn't a given and getting audio samples in front of listeners took real infrastructure decisions. The label's debut release was Carolyn Martin's "The Very Thought Of You," a standards record. The site had to make that feel like an event worth paying attention to.

A boutique label site in this era was doing a lot of things at once: building credibility for artists who didn't have major label marketing behind them, creating a destination that music press and radio could point people toward, and running e-commerce for a catalog that was still being built. The design had to suggest permanence and taste without pretending the label had a back catalog it didn't. That is a specific kind of problem, and the coffee house aesthetic solved it cleanly.

Austin PianoWorks has been serving Central Texas since 2000 - tuning, repairs, rebuilding, and appraisals - and their client list reads like a cross-section of everything that makes Austin Austin.

Jim Eno of Spoon. Austin State Hospital. The Vortex. Hyde Park Presbyterian. Cacophony Recorders. The Shire Recording Studio. Recording studios, churches, schools, hospitals, and working musicians, all trusting the same shop with instruments that in some cases are over a century old. That is a credibility profile that takes years to build and cannot be faked.

The design matched the work: parchment backgrounds, Victorian ornamental borders, period-appropriate script lettering in the Austin PianoWorks logo, and typography that respected the age of the instruments being restored. A piano technician working on an 1870 Steinway Square Grand should not have a website that looks like a tech startup. The aesthetic said craftsmanship, patience, and expertise - which is exactly what someone buying a $20,000 rebuild needs to feel before they hand over the keys.

What made the site genuinely ahead of its time was the architecture underneath the surface. A live Current Projects panel displayed active restorations by year and model - a 1933 Shubert baby grand, a 1924 Mason & Hamlin AA 6'2" - giving customers real-time visibility into the shop's work. Online appointment scheduling, a client portal, a full FAQ, a Piano Info educational section, and a Pianos For Sale inventory rounded out the feature set. In 2001, most service businesses had a phone number and a paragraph. This was a full-service customer experience built for a one-person shop. That gap was the whole point.

Eric Sarafin - Mixerman - is one of the most influential voices in pro audio of the last twenty-five years: platinum-level producer and engineer, author of the Zen and the Art of Mixing series published by Hal Leonard, and the person behind the Daily Adventures of Mixerman, the anonymous online diary of a major-label recording session that became required reading in studios everywhere before it became a book.

His audience is not casual. It is working engineers, producers, and musicians who can hear the difference between competent and extraordinary, and who apply the same filter to everything else they encounter - including the visual presentation of someone they trust for professional guidance. Designing for that audience is a specific kind of pressure.

The relationship covers the full range: website, branding identity, book covers, advertising. That kind of long-term creative partnership is different from a single project engagement. You develop shorthand. You understand what the client's instincts are, where they have strong opinions, and where they want to be surprised. With Mixerman the constraint is always that the work has to feel credible to an audience that does not give credibility easily. The Mixerman brand operates at the intersection of professional authority and irreverence - opinionated, technically rigorous, and not interested in being polished for the sake of it.

Book cover work for a Hal Leonard publication reaches a different audience than a website does. It lands in music stores, school catalogs, and publisher listings alongside everything else in the Hal Leonard catalog. It has to work at thumbnail size and at full bleed. The Zen series covers had to signal both the technical depth of the content and the voice of the author - someone who knows exactly what he is talking about and will tell you so directly. That is a harder design brief than a straightforward instructional book cover.

The advertising and identity work extended the same visual language across platforms and formats over years. Maintaining consistency for a personal brand across that kind of timeline, while the brand itself evolves as the author publishes more work and builds more credibility, requires a working relationship built on trust in both directions. The credits accumulated on this one. That is what a client looks like when the work is right from the beginning.

Dell Technologies in Round Rock, Texas was one of the fastest-growing companies on earth in 1995 - shipping millions of PCs while simultaneously trying to support every customer who called in with a hardware problem they couldn't diagnose.

As Senior Application Developer and Web Technologist II from 1995 to 1999, the scope of the work was not small. support.dell.com, DellTech (the internal infrastructure site housing every tool the support organization needed), the Multiple Program Simulator, and a hardware troubleshooting series that served as the linear diagnostic framework for the entire support staff. The trophies are real. There are several of them.

The central innovation was delivering troubleshooting applications as HTML so support staff and customers didn't have to install software to diagnose problems. In 1996 and 1997, that was not an obvious solution. Installing support applications on customer machines created support calls about the support software. Delivering the same functionality through a browser eliminated an entire category of friction and put the tools where the people already were. The ~40% efficiency improvement that followed was not an accident; it was the direct result of meeting users at the interface they already understood.

DellTech consolidated the infrastructure layer - all the tools, all the documentation, all the internal resources - into a single coherent system that the support organization could actually navigate. At the scale Dell was operating, disorganized internal tooling is not an inconvenience; it is a measurable cost per call per agent per hour. The architecture behind DellTech was built to eliminate that cost systematically. The hardware troubleshooting series brought the same logic to the diagnostic side: linear, consistent, testable, deployable across an entire support floor without retraining.

The work at Dell was the first real exposure to what software looks like when it operates at scale - not dozens of users, not hundreds, but a global support organization with tens of thousands of daily interactions flowing through systems that had to be right. That experience shaped everything that came afterward. The trophies are on the shelf. The instincts are still in use.