FN · August 10, 2026

Long Strange Trip I: First set (2013)

Part one of a thirteen-part professional memoir: walking into a Fargo software shop in 2013, the Drupal 7 era in full swing, and learning that shipping is the only teacher.

FN · August 10, 2026

Long Strange Trip II: GPS in the bones (2013–2015)

Part two: shipping native mobile apps with GPS at their core from Fargo — and what building for devices in the field teaches that browser work never will.

FN · August 10, 2026

Long Strange Trip III: Standing up the cloud (2015–2017)

Part three: building AWS architecture from nothing in the mid-2010s, when 'the cloud' stopped being a buzzword and became the job — and what infrastructure work does to a builder's mind.

FN · August 10, 2026

Long Strange Trip IV: The person who answers (2017–2018)

Part four: what seven years as a project lead actually trains — estimation as honesty, translation as the real deliverable, and being the name attached when things break.

FN · August 10, 2026

Long Strange Trip V: The polyglot years (2018–2019)

Part five: shipping .NET and PHP side by side to Red River Valley businesses, and how serving a small market's whole economy makes platform tribalism impossible.

FN · August 10, 2026

Long Strange Trip VI: Leaving Fargo (2020)

Part six: seven years at the Fargo shop end in the strangest year there was — what the valley installed for good, and what moving to Minneapolis was actually for.

FN · August 10, 2026

Long Strange Trip VII: The migration years (2020–2021)

Part seven: Minneapolis agency work as sole technical lead on enterprise Drupal portfolios — what changes at scale, and what stubbornly doesn't.

FN · August 10, 2026

Long Strange Trip VIII: Millions of nodes (2021–2022)

Part eight: the defining project — a monolithic Drupal 7 application, millions of nodes, rebuilt as Drupal 10 while the site kept publishing. The memoir angle: what carrying it was like.

FN · August 10, 2026

Long Strange Trip IX: Guardrails (2022–2023)

Part nine: standardizing Behat tests across an agency — how one project's safety net became shop infrastructure, and why process you leave behind outlives code you wrote.

FN · August 10, 2026

Long Strange Trip X: Back to school (2024)

Part ten: finishing the NDSU computer science degree eleven years into the career it describes — why bother, what the classroom looks like from the far side of production, and what it closed.

FN · August 10, 2026

Long Strange Trip XI: The fleet era (2024–2025)

Part eleven: backend engineering for media properties measured in millions of monthly visits, and the shift from thinking in sites to thinking in fleets.

FN · August 10, 2026

Long Strange Trip XII: Building the robot (2026)

Part twelve: V.I.N.CENT — turning fleet-era conviction into an observability agent watching 327 production sites, and what building your own instruments does to a builder.

FN · August 10, 2026

Long Strange Trip XIII: Dead North (2026)

The final part: founding Dead North LLC — why the name, why now, why published prices and a rescue practice, and what thirteen years assembled into.