Howdy. I'm Smittie.

When I started in the computer industry, the Internet was not readily available to the general public and the World Wide Web had not been invented yet. I wrote software for Apple's Newton (an early predecessor to Android and iOS), was a project manager on the iPod and a quality assurance engineer at Roku. I have worked on the Microsoft Windows team at Microsoft, Apple's Mac OS 9 and OS X at Apple, embedded Linux and Android at several start-ups. I have maintained a personal web site since 1996, a blog since 2003, joined Twitter in the first year of its existence. For fun, I play with html, CSS, JavaScript, various content management systems and things I find on the Internet.

When I was young I wanted to be a cowboy. They told me there were no cowboys left in the world; I believed them. I was 37 years old when I discovered that they had lied to me. Saddest day of my life. I love cowboy culture. I find any way I can to spend as much time as I can on ranches. Anybody's ranch, I don't care. Especially if there are cattle to tend and horses to tend them on. My perfect job would be riding for a brand, tending cattle in the morning, managing technology in the afternoon but anything that moves me closer to livestock and ranches is the right direction. In the end, I like farms better than cities and ranches better than farms.

Marrying more than 20 years of experience in the computer software and consumer electronics industries with my passion for ranching and livestock resulted in the formation of RanchHacks which currently less than a year old. RanchHacks strives to partner with ranchers and livestock producers to leverage technology to improve efficiency and effectiveness in their operation.