I spent 35 years teaching programming, robotics, and math at the college level. I loved creating new curricula, designing robotic competitions, writing fiction in my spare time, and building furniture and mathematical designs/art out of wood. In general, I love to create!
Although I am not a beader, my daughter-in-law Vanessa is. She beads absolutely gorgeous earrings — the kind of intricate, precisely symmetric work that connect with my geometric imagination. During Covid, she asked me to design an app that would help in designing patterns. I worked on that for a bit, but got too busy to finish it. Then, this spring, my wife's hairdresser — an avid beader herself — heard of my work and encouraged me to finish it.
I'm the kind of person who loves a challenge.
So of course, 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 turns 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 for my daughter-in-law. Now, I'm happy to send it out into the world and see what people make with it.
