I spent 35 years teaching programming, robotics, and math — mostly to students who were counting the minutes until class ended. Now that I'm retired, I get to point that same problem-solving instinct at things I actually choose: woodworking, writing, and, for the last couple of years, a beading app nobody asked a computer scientist to build.
My daughter-in-law Vanessa beads absolutely gorgeous earrings — the kind of intricate, precisely symmetric work that made me start wondering how she kept track of all of it. Around the same time, my wife's hairdresser — an avid beader herself — kept telling me I should build something for it.
I'm the kind of person who has a hard time turning down a good excuse to build something.
So eventually, I did.
Thirty-five years of teaching programming and robotics means I've spent most of my career explaining to people how to break a problem down into steps a machine can follow. A beading pattern turned out to be a surprisingly good fit for that kind of thinking — rows, columns, symmetry, the color math involved in something like a radial medallion. It's geometry with a very tactile payoff. I wrote every line of Bead Works myself, the same way I'd have wanted a student to work through a hard problem: patiently, and by hand.
When I'm not writing code, I'm probably in the workshop building something out of wood, or several chapters deep into the fantasy-sci-fi series I've been writing for middle-grade readers — four books in, so far. I like making things. It turns out a beading app is just one more way to do that.
Bead Works started as a tool built to solve a real problem for people I care about. It's still early — live on the web, in beta on Android, with iOS on the way — but after two years of building it mostly for an audience of one very patient hairdresser, I'm happy to finally send it out into the world and see what people make with it.
