Bleeding Edge Then.
Bleeding Edge Now.

01 Miami — The Club Years

Before the internet ate everything, I was already building inside it. Lead Flash Developer at Twinteach U by ’97 — Macromedia Shockwave, Director, Quicktime, when those were the bleeding edge. By ’99 I’d already shipped my first agency-grade work, brand identities, and brochure sites.

In 2000 and 2001 I built the first websites for Ultra Music Festival — Ultra32k1.net and Ultra2000.net. 500,000+ unique visitors in under a month, online ticket sales that broke records for any EDM event of its time, and attendance more than tripled in a single year — 7,500 to 24,000. Year two the city of Miami Beach kicked us off the beach because we’d outgrown it. Bayfront Park became home and Ultra shattered global EDM attendance records. This was before Myspace. Before Facebook. Before anyone called it "event marketing."

From there it was VJ residencies and creative-director seats at the biggest rooms in Miami — Amika, Crobar, Space, Cameo, and Nocturnal. Senior Creative Director at CHAUVET running brand, packaging, and trade-show design for the lighting world. Senior Creative Director at AMIKA Miami as resident VJ/DJ. Back in Miami’s club scene, we’d design, print, and distribute 10,000 flyers in 24 hours for tonight’s event. Same energy drives everything I do today.

Running through all of it: a 19-year creative partnership with world-renowned producer George Acosta — record-label sites, brand work, social campaigns that pushed his Twitter and Facebook followings into the hundreds of thousands, plus a few records I co-produced that landed on Beatport and iTunes.

Before "content creator" was a job title, I was building the look, the screens, the hype, and the digital front door. That’s why I don’t build boring websites now.

02 Patents, IPOs & Creative Direction

The nightlife work led to Senior Creative Director for the Winter Music Conference — the biggest electronic music industry event on the planet. Conceived and designed the 2008 theme. Wrote and laid out The Guide and The List. Shipped the first mobile site of The List back when "mobile site" was barely a phrase. Plus signage, video, lighting, sound, and on-the-ground event production. Building brands and running campaigns before "content marketing" had a name.

Around the same time I joined Michael Egan’s think tank as VP Marketing at theglobe.com (NASDAQ: TGLO) — one of the original social media sites. theglobe.com’s 1998 IPO posted a 606% first-day gain — the largest first-day IPO gain in history at that point. By the time I came in, the company was reinventing itself around web telephony. I conceptualized and built tgloFriends — the first online social community with VOIP technology baked in, built on phpNuke (PHP+MySQL).

That work resulted in two co-invented U.S. patents:

After theglobe.com I co-ran Vice Alliance with designer Angelo Manzano — a small studio with a client list that punched far above its weight:

03 Tribune Media — AWS Architect, Six Mastheads

I signed on at the Sun-Sentinel as a media project manager — Fort Lauderdale’s locally owned paper under the Chicago Tribune umbrella. Within a year I was building web applications in PHP+MySQL that drove run-of-site advertising across the East Coast: BSO/PBSO/Orange County mugshots galleries, Holiday Lights, News Tips, plus contests and sweepstakes that grew the registered membership base by 250,000+ users.

That work earned promotions to Applications Developer, then Software Engineer II, then Software Engineer III / Architect, reporting directly to the Director of Software Engineering at Tribune Digital. I led the migration of all East Coast publication infrastructure to Amazon Web Services — solution design and architecture across EC2, RDS, SES, Auto Scaling Groups, and a fleet of Unix environments running JIRA, SCRUM, and Agile delivery. My digital media work shipped across six of the biggest publications in America:

Plus the Hype Orlando / South Florida blog network and EmergingUS. Newspaper digital wasn’t glamorous, but it was real. Millions of readers. Real deadlines. Real stakes. It taught me that good enough on time beats perfect next week — a lesson that still drives every project I touch.

04 The Captain's License

Took a buyout from Tribune. Got my captain's license. Moved to the Keys. In August 2015, I signed on as mate under legendary Captain Joe Saba on the original DirtyBoat. Three years hauling lines, learning the water, earning every callus.

Then I bought the boat and the business from Joe. Now I run DirtyBoat 2.0 — a 42-foot Liberty Express with 900HP twin turbo Cummins diesels, docked at Robbie's Marina in Islamorada. Mahi, tuna, swordfish, sailfish. If it has fins and fights, we're hunting it.

I compete at the highest level: Gold Cup, Islamorada Sailfish Tournament, Cheeca Presidential, Islamorada Fishing Club Tournament, Fish for Holly. I also serve as a Board Member of the Islamorada Charterboat Association — since December 2022, helping shape policy for the working captains of the sportfishing capital of the world. Vice President of S.A.F.E. (South Atlantic Fishing Environmentalists), 460+ members fighting for sustainable fisheries management.

And the digital work never stopped. I’ve been the webmaster for Robbie’s Marina since 2016 — ten-plus years on the digital backbone for one of the most-photographed marinas in the Florida Keys, including the FareHarbor affiliate network that doubled party-boat bookings in year one and still routes charter inquiries across the dock today.

05 The Conservation Fight

The ocean isn't just where I work. It's why I work. Every charter, every website, every conservation meeting — it all circles back to the same thing: keep the water healthy, keep the fish swimming, keep the Keys alive. I also moderate r/saltwaterfishing, one of the largest saltwater fishing communities on Reddit.

06 AI-Powered Web Dev

Now I'm building websites in 24 hours using AI through Kit Mobley Web Development. Same hustle, new tools. Astro, Tailwind, Netlify — lean stack, clean code, zero bloat.

I was cranking out club flyers at 3 AM in 2001. Now I'm shipping complete websites before sunrise. The medium changed. The energy didn't.