I was the founding design engineer at Cargo Collective, now known simply as Cargo.

Cargo is a personal publishing tool for creative practice. As the first full-time hire, I contributed to everything — conceptualization, interface design, front-end programming — and wore many other hats, as you might imagine.

I joined at age 19 and moved to Los Angeles. Memories of getting kicked out of bars when trying to grab a post-work drink come to mind. We worked out of a room in a craftsman house in Angelino Heights, and later a studio along the Los Angeles river in Frogtown.

For a number of years, joining Cargo required an invitation or an application: a single open-ended textarea prompting a description of your practice. Some people wrote a sentence, others wrote paragraphs. Each one I personally reviewed, and most I responded to. I would generate an invitation, copy a template in the macOS Mail app, paste the link in, and occasionally write something personal about the work. I sent tens of thousands of invites by hand over several years.

These years were personally foundational in many ways, greatly informing how I see the world, and where I find motivation and meaning within it.