My daughter-in-law Vanessa is a beader. She creates 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, in spring 2026, 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 accepted the challenge and finished the app. Now, it is time to let it grow up and see the world!
Thirty-five years of teaching programming and robotics means I've spent most of my career explaining how to break a problem down into simple steps. A beading pattern turns out to be a surprisingly good fit for that kind of thinking — rows, columns, symmetry. It's geometry with a very tactile interface. I enjoyed the coding challenge of merging geometry with artistic expression.
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.
I spent 35 years teaching programming, robotics, and math at the college level. I loved creating new curricula, creating useful software, designing robotic competitions, writing fiction, and building furniture and mathematical designs/art out of wood. In general, I love to create!
