About
What Would You Say…You Do Here?
A couple weeks back, I noticed something in indie media that caught my attention — scattered reports that over a hundred heavy transport aircraft, possibly more than two hundred, were heading toward the Middle East. The last time that happened was the lead-up to Desert Storm. Combine that with the saber-rattling toward Iran and the fact that most of the world’s exported oil ships through the Strait of Hormuz, and it didn’t take a geopolitical analyst to connect the dots: fuel prices were about to spike.
So I did what anyone with fuel tanks on a North Dakota homestead would do. I called West Dakota Oil and asked them to top me off.
When the driver pulled up (just a few hours later–those guys are amazing), we got to visiting — as you do — and I mentioned the fuel situation. He looked at me and asked the question I always have a hard time answering:
“What is it you do for a living, anyway?”
I had to laugh. Because I honestly don’t have a good answer for that anymore.
When we were running Hurt Ridge Candy, it was easy. “My wife and I are drug dealers with sugar.” People got it. Freeze-dried candy — fun, tangible, something you could hand somebody. We shut that business down in December (though you can still grab our candy through our retail partners and distributors until supplies run out), and ever since, I’ve been fumbling the elevator pitch.
It reminds me of how my parents handled the same question back in the day when I started my own web development firm in 1998. Someone would ask, “What does your son do?” and they’d say, “Oh, he works with computers.” That was the best they could translate. And here I am, three decades later, in the exact same spot.
If you’ve seen Office Space — now twenty-five years old, which hurts to say — there’s that scene where the two Bobs ask the character, “What would you say… you do here?” It’s played for laughs, but the deeper layer in the onion is one of defensive justification for one’s position in an organization.
So let me take a crack at it.
I have a homestead, but plenty of people live out in the country and keep chickens and collect stray cats. That’s a lifestyle, not a job title. I’ve written and published novels with my wife — eight of them, and I’m proud of every one — but I haven’t put one out in six years (I’m a little embarrassed to admit), and we never earned a living at it besides. Before that, RaeLea and I worked as wellsite geologists in the oilfield, and that was the easiest answer I ever had. But that chapter closed, too.
What do I do now? I work with computers.
More specifically, I’m an agentic AI engineer. That means I collaborate with AI agents to build websites, applications, and tools that save people time — my neighbors, my family and friends, my clients. That’s become the mission.
Here’s the thing about artificial intelligence right now: it’s everywhere, and it’s confusing. Trying to keep up with all of it is like drinking from a fire hose. I don’t think there’s a single person on the planet who can track every development — certainly not me. You have to pick your lane.
My lane happens to sit at an intersection I’ve been building toward for decades without realizing it. Fourteen-plus years as a professional web developer (before website design got commoditized) gave me the technical chops. But what I discovered during that time — and what turned out to matter more — was a knack for explaining complicated technology to the everyday person who’s busy living their life. Folks who don’t have time to parse the jargon, and shouldn’t have to.
A common thread with me is that I like to figure out how things work. I try to understand the world — which is a big statement, but it links to everything from homesteading to novel-writing to tracking military cargo flights on a Tuesday night. Now I get to stand at the front edge of this new era and translate what’s happening in artificial intelligence into something useful for you, my neighbor.
That’s the mission of Hurt Ridge Labs: showcase the tinkering and experiments I love doing, and along the way, offer a few practical solutions you might actually want to use.
So that’s what I’d say I do here.