Eras
1985 My NeXT Amiga 1996 I’m a Mac 2002 Terminal EDGE 2008 Mobile Developer 2012 Geolocated 2018 Boston Flight 2025 Learning Intelligence ●
1985 – 1995
My NeXT Amiga
Commodore Amiga 1000 / 500 / 1200
1985: the Amiga 1000 ships and Steve Jobs leaves Apple to found NeXT — two paths that meet a decade later as OS X. My first computer was an Amiga; I went deep on it doing Army reconnaissance in Europe, where it was a phenomenon. The Amiga multitasked before the Mac and out-rendered every PC. It still lost. Riding a superior platform into irrelevance teaches what no CS class does: merit and survival are separate arguments.
The Machine Boot a 1985 Amiga in the Silicon lab soon
1996 – 2001
I’m a Mac
Apple PowerBook 190 · PowerBook 1400c · 33.6 modem · AOL
The Amiga was dead and I needed a platform that would outlive me. College bookstore, academic discount, a PowerBook 190 — Classic Mac OS wasn’t the logical choice, it was the interesting one, and that distinction has mattered for forty years. On a 33.6 modem to AOL — the first breath of the public internet — I searched my own surname and found the MacSweeney line: being “a Mac” a full decade before Apple ran the ad.
The Name The MacSweeney lineage, still in flight → 2002 – 2007
Terminal EDGE
G4 Quicksilver · G4 PowerBook → MacBook Pro · OS X 10.2 → Tiger
A G4 tower and a G4 PowerBook that became a MacBook Pro mid-generation. OS X had finally exposed the Unix soul NeXT put there — Apache, MySQL, PHP running natively on hardware enterprise refused to take seriously. Network admin by day, LAMP developer by night. The market caught on years later; by then I’d been shipping from that stack since the tower in the spare room. The architecture tells you first. Marketing explains it later.
The Terminal Where the Unix soul still lives → 2008 – 2012
Mobile Developer
iPhone 1 → iPhone 4S · Objective-C · App Store 2008
The iPhone SDK changed everything. I taught myself Objective-C from Aaron Hillegass’ book and turned a network admin into an iOS engineer — a PlainJoe super-commuting to Palo Alto, a mobile developer in every sense. I rode my bicycle to work past a house on Waverley Street with apple trees in the yard before I understood whose it was: a bicycle for the mind, ridden past the home of the man who named it that.
The Commute How the network admin became an engineer → 2012 – 2017
Geolocated
iPhone 5 → iPhone 7 · Swift from day one · MapKit
In 2007 I lined up outside the Glendale Galleria for the first iPhone, opened Maps, and watched it place me on the planet — and a thought I’d had years earlier in a German field, shown GPS in a howitzer, came back in spades. That moment made me an iOS developer aimed at geospatial. The bet paid off my first day at MapQuest. Swift arrived in 2014; I took it from day one. The quest landed me in Colorado.
The Quest The reference app it all built toward soon
2018 – 2025
Boston Flight
MacBook Pro · Swift 5 · Apple Silicon announced 2020
From building features to designing systems — software architect and team lead, first at Wayfair, then APG. Boston, a continent from my wife in Colorado, where we’d married in Wayfarers Chapel; the name kept echoing. Apple Silicon landed in 2020 and the edge-computing implications were obvious to anyone watching the architecture. The AI-governance thesis started forming here — and so did the flight home, to Colorado and to aviation. Flight, both meanings.
The Flight Where the flight home leads → 2025 → now
Learning Intelligence
Mac Mini M4 Pro · 6-node Kubernetes · Mac Studio M5 Ultra (incoming)
Six Intel Mac Minis as a Kubernetes control plane. A Mac Mini M4 Pro as the edge AI lab, with ClawLaw’s constitutional governance sitting between Claude and the filesystem. A Mac Studio M5 Ultra inbound for large-model inference. Forty years after the Amiga, the full stack — philosophy to firmware — runs in one room. The arc hasn’t been released yet.
The Classroom What the arc is becoming →