About

Small Block Software is a personal studio — one developer, building software for problems worth solving.

I learned to write software in 10th grade, from my school principal, Barry Smith — a former computer science professor who saw something worth teaching. The small church school we’d just started couldn’t afford a computer yet, so he taught me BASIC the old way: I wrote programs out on paper and he evaluated them for correctness by hand. Later that year the school got a TRS-80 Model II, and I finally got to run my programs on real hardware. Almost immediately I wanted to know how BASIC itself worked, so he taught me Z80 assembly language. Writing software has been my thing ever since.

That hunger to understand what’s underneath came from somewhere earlier. My dad — a metal fabricator and engine builder — handed me old carburetors to disassemble starting around age five. One day he told me the next one I had to put back together before he’d give me another. Pay attention to how things come apart. Organize your parts. Build a mental model before you build anything else. It turned out to be equally good advice for software.

I’ve been writing code professionally since 1988 — assembly language through cloud services, Windows to iOS, desktop to server-side. The craft matters. Simple, maintainable software is harder to build than clever software, and more worth building. Over that time I’ve built software for companies including ERIM, Unisys, Brunswick Bowling & Billiards, X-Rite, and Amway.

The current flagship project is Manojos, a life-logging app built around automatic pattern discovery. More to come.