I want to share a bit about my journey as just a guy from Kentucky trying to make a living doing something I love: building communities and seeking personal independence and freedom.

I started teaching myself how to code in 2005 when I was just 12 years old. My initial goal was to create private video game servers for fun, which eventually led me to open those servers to friends. This growth sparked the need for forums to foster discussions around those game servers, and that's where my love for building websites began.

This experience helped me kickstart my career as a software engineer, and I joined my first startup in 2015. Over the years, I worked for various startups, but eventually, burnout set in. I realized I needed a change and wanted to build something of my own, rather than someone else’s vision.

To clear my mental headspace, I left the tech industry completely, hoping that time away would help me figure out my focus. It’s been a struggle, to say the least. For the past two and a half years, I’ve been working in a factory, bouncing from idea to idea, building little experiments and side projects, but nothing truly satisfied me; everything felt… empty.

Last summer, I decided to try something different and reconnect with something I had started to explore during the COVID lockdowns. I dove into music production, which has become a fun escape from the grind of tech. However, I needed a way to organize all my links and a place to direct people curious about my projects.

And that's how the Splash Club was born!