My relationship with computers started with a jailbreak. I was seven or eight, already in bed, when I heard commotion downstairs that clearly wasn't supposed to include me. My dad — a hobbyist programmer, tinkering nights and weekends — had come home with our family's first computer, retiring the typewriter that had held down the fort until then. I was told there'd be a surprise in the morning. Reader, I did not wait until morning. I snuck downstairs that night to see what all the fuss was about, and I never really came back up. In hindsight this says less about early genius and more about me being a determined little troublemaker — but the screen stuck, and I've been glued to one in some form ever since.
That early curiosity turned into a habit of poking at new technology to see what it can actually do, not just what it's supposed to do. These days that means AI — and it's changed what's possible for a business like mine. I run Making a Mark with AI as a side hustle alongside my day job, which just means you get me directly — no account managers, no handoffs, fast turnaround, and someone who actually built the thing answering when you call. What once took a team and a runway now takes an evening and a good prompt: a multi-facility senior living operator runs its census and AR reporting today on a system I built solo — and that's just one of them. The same approach has gone into ordering and e-commerce systems, marketing sites, and tools built to run a business's day-to-day, not just report on it.
So that's the pitch: a lifelong tinkerer who snuck downstairs once for a computer and has been finding excuses to do it again ever since — now just with better tools, real clients, and permission to be up this late.