These are notable events in my life, inspired by Chris Coyier. Mostly this is to help me remember.

1982 - Birth

1988 - Met my first computer

I still remember it. It was a VIC-20 running a game called FaceMaker. I didn't know what I was going to do with my life at that time, but I knew it would involve computers.

1995 - Moved to Baton Rouge, LA

1996 - Started Shiftedfrequency

It's the company I still own today. In 1996 I designed websites and repaired/built computers for mostly local businesses, but today it's the holding company for most of my products.

1999 - SchoolNet

I helped to administer Unix servers and a modem bank at my high school that provided dial-up internet access to teachers and students in our parish.

2000 - Taught a Flash Programming class

My freshman year of high school, I was put in Computer Literacy class because I transferred late and there was no more room in Computer Science I. After the first class, where I proved that I really didn't need to be there, the Computer Literacy teacher took me down the hall to meet the Computer Science teacher. The next day I was in Computer Science II AP. So, by the time I was a senior there were no more CS classes for me to take. I was allowed to write the curriculum and teach a Flash Programming class myself (with adult supervision to make sure things didn't get out of hand).

2000 - LSU Computing Services

As a student worker, I wrote a lot of LotusScript. I made some lifelong friends and developed an abiding hatred for LotusScript.

2001 - Finally learned to drive, bought my first car

It was a navy blue 1991 Honda Accord EX. I loved that car.

2002 - Interchange

CD burning and mix CDs were really big at the time. I love music, so I made a website that helped people from around the country to swap Mix CDs with each other. They signed up, and I matched them with other people. They'd make mix CDs and mail them to each other. If someone didn't mail a CD, they were dropped from the list. I wasn't any good at backend web programming at the time, so it was literally just a website with an email address, and I did all of the people matching for the swaps by hand.

2003 - Safety Connection Inc

Redesigned website and built an online store featuring over 2000 fall protection products, maintained website with full server redundancy, provided IT support for traveling employees and in-house IT support as well, keeping all desktops and laptops updated and in working order. I was also in charge of recommending and purchasing new computer equipment as needed.

2005 - FreshArrival

Launched FreshArrival, which featured one cool thing a day. Eventually we had a whole team of people helping me manage the site, writing posts and doing product reviews. It's where I met Chris Coyier.

2005 - IT Group, Inc

Wrote custom code in VB, ASP, ASP.NET and PHP to support custom client applications in the document management field. The company sold document management systems to clients, and I wrote software that met the needs of the particular client, with regards to efficiency, stability and making our software best fit or enhance their daily workflows. Also went out to client sites to configure and install our software/hardware. Received both FileNet and OnBase certifications.

2006 - Ruby On Rails

Started learning Ruby On Rails, using the now infamous Agile Web Development with Rails book. My first version of Rails was 1.1.1.

2006 - Hngry

Launched Hngry.com. It let you keep track of your favorite restaurants, menu items, and see what other people in your area were eating. I actually ended up being flown out to NY to present to the CEO of Campusfood, which ended up getting sold to Grubhub in 2011. I declined their deal to acquihire Hngry/me. Hngry ended up being killed by Urbanspoon and Yelp.

It also managed to generate this humiliating blog post, which really hurt my feelings at the time. I couldn't believe that after all of my work, someone took the time to write that. But she was right.

2008 - Waitable

Waitable let you add things that you wanted to a list and get alerts when their prices dropped. I mostly built it because I wanted good deals on videogames, which always seemed to drop to $20 within a few months of release.

2008 - What's the Weather

What's the Weather (built with Chris Coyier) showed you the weather for your zip code, with a full-page background image that matched your weather conditions, pulled from Flickr.

2008 - Status

Status (built with Chris Coyier) was basically Twitter for business. It let people see what everyone else in the company was working on. Yammer killed it.

2009 - Are My Sites Up

Are My Sites Up (built with Chris Coyier) is simple website monitoring, for everyone.

2009 - LyricSift

LyricSift was an iPhone app and a website that allowed anyone to submit lyric snippets from their favorite songs, and it rotated between them when you shook your iPhone. You could also play a song preview if it was on the iTunes Store. Some record company decided that they didn't like it and murdered it.

2009 - mnstrbar.com

I made a goofy web app that let you put other websites into the mouth of a monster.

2009 - Gatorworks Web Design

I was Lead Developer. I developed numerous Rails-based web applications that garnered press and helped entrepreneurs realize their ambitions with an app that met their requirements. Also maintained and added new features to legacy Rails, PHP and ASP based web applications. Met a couple of my best friends here.

2009 - iMac Shuffle

iMac Shuffle was a parody website that I made with Chris Coyier after Apple released the 3rd generation iPod shuffle, which had no buttons and was controlled with the remote on the headphones. We thought they were going too far.

2010 - Sense Labs

Came up with ideas for applications that would make people’s lives better in some way, and developed/released them alongside my business partner, David Link. I did the backend programming in Rails/ Objective-C, as well as writing all marketing/sales copy.

2010 - Protips

Protips aggregated the #protip hash tage on Twitter. It was killed when Twitter closed their public API.

2010 - Are My Sites Up White Label

Are My Sites Up White Label enabled agencies to resell website monitoring to their clients.

2010 - BalanceBar

BalanceBar showed your current PayPal balance in your Mac's menu bar.

2010 - What's the Weather?

What's the Weather was a full-screen website mashup that showed the current weather conditions using images tagged with the corresponding weather conditions in Flickr.

2010 - We Love Lost

I built We Love Lost with Chris Coyier to celebrate our love for that TV show. We held a contest and gave away the full box set.

2010 - Slickrframe

Slickrframe turned iPads into Flickr photo frames, based on popular photos and user-selected tags.

2010 - Dispatch

Dispatch was launched as a customer support app, with some automation features that were ahead of its time.

2011 - Hngry iOS

Hngry was relaunched as an iOS app that let you keep track of your favorite restaurants, dishes, hours of operation, and more.

2011 - Dropp

Dropp was an iOS app that let you leave notes for people anywhere on the Earth.

2012 - Flickd

Flickd was a smart movie list for iOS that kept track of what you wanted to see and alerted you when it was on disc or Netflix Instant. It could also add movies to your Netflix queue for you when they became available, and allowed you to keep track of your favorite actors/directors as well.

2012 - Dispatch

Dispatch was relaunched as the best email parser for sales leads.

2012 - Stunning

Stunning, for Stripe stops SaaS app churn by preventing failed payments, and that's just the start.

2013 - Briefly

Briefly was a weeklyish newsletter of the best articles I read each week that related to online business.

2013 - LocationList

LocationList was an iOS grocery list that learned the order that things are added to your shopping cart. It also reordered itself based on the store where you were shopping.

2014 - Spoke at BaconBizConf

This was the first time I visited Philadelphia. It's quickly become my favorite city to visit. I made a few lasting friendships here.

2014 - Retained

Retained tells you who's going to cancel before they do, so you can proactively reach out and retain customers for your SaaS app.

2014 - Customer Retention Academy

Customer Retention Academy is a newsletter that shares what I've learned about customer retention from my years of building successful SaaS apps.

2016 - Spoke to Dr. Crusher from Star Trek TNG on the phone

2016 - Spoke at BaconBizConf a second time

I met some pretty cool people that I'd only talked to on the internet before.

2018 - Bought our first house

2018 - Newsboys reunion concert

During one of their songs, Peter Furler handed me his microphone and let me sing the chorus to one of their songs to an entire arena.

2018 - IMDB

Got an IMDB page!

2019 - Surfacer

Surfacer improves customer retention by helping you to bring your content marketing to your paying customers.

2019 - Hot Luck Fest

Finally got to eat brisket from Franklin BBQ. It lived up to the hype.

2019 - Celine Dion concert

Managed to get 10th row seats to Celine Dion. It was one of the best concerts I've ever been to.

2020 - Table Read with the X-Men

At Comic-Con, my wife and I were picked to do a table read of an entire episode of X-Men: The Animated Series with most of the voice cast. I played Cyclops, who was my favorite character from the cartoons, and Jenny played Jean Grey.

2021 - Received both doses of the COVID-19 Pfizer vaccine

2021 - Walked into a grocery store for the first time since March of 2020

2023 - Lived in Beverly Hills for a week

2023 - Flew across the country to video call my best friend from her front yard and surprise her

2023 - Sponsored Stripe Sessions

2024 - Met Peter Cullen, one of my childhood heroes...the voice of Optimus Prime.

2024 - Gave a standing-room only talk at Stripe Sessions that was attended by people from Logitech, Take Two, Automattic, Mindbody, Pepsi, etc.