In 1999 I visited Black Rock City for the first time, and though cliché it may sound, that week would prove to profoundly inform the path my life would take both professionally and personally. I had a successful design agency in Sacramento but was looking for the next chapter. There I met Mindy, who was looking to hire a designer in San Francisco. She interviewed me right there on the dusty playa and within the month I had moved to the Bay Area where I remain today. When I arrived in SF I joined as webmaster and design lead for Burning Man and helped build the website and the event over the next 9 years and two website redesigns. I have been a participant 13 times.

By all definitions, Burning Man defies definitions. Even the manner it goes about tackling technology and communication with an incredibly unique community is an experimental exercise in volunteerism and information design. I join the Burning Man team in December 1999 as webmaster, and was handed the keys to a cherished and profoundly important website. This website was not running on GoDaddy or any handy frameworks, it was a hand-crafted machine created by one of the original creators of Apache and had been run by Scott at Laughing Squid until I took over.

In 2000 the web team took on a major redesign and information overhaul of the website, which containing hundreds of pages of crucial information and resources for the community. With a volunteer team located virtually all over the globe, we built the new site and launched it in time for the 2000 event needs.

By 2004, the event had grown up a lot, and so had the internet. Burning Man was still super grassroots DIY and ran our own servers. This included an OEM ticketing system that avoiding any corporate or consumer entities but required massive scaling and load-balancing considerations during the yearly peak ticket timeframe.