In 2019, Alycia and I had our second child, our daughter, Dorothy, who we call Dottie. The Lodge disbanded and I parted ways with Wieden+Kennedy a few months later. I started freelancing, which lead to running my own short-lived shop, First Ones Here.

I reconnected with my Radical Media colleague, James, who had started his own Rehash Studio, now branded Welcome Agency. We would work together on scores of projects, mostly helping startups execute their ideas. The mammoth project was Padcaster. It's a dry utility compared to my usual work, but it is chock-full of solutions to difficult tech challenges. Lots of Metal shader work, media capture and streaming efficiencies, subject tracking before it was available on any device natively, and cloud storage and web front-end layers.

I did a lot of web work, but was happiest with the sites I made for the Opinionated Group and the City of Estacada's Questacada. These turned out to be the last web sites I made with no AI-agent assistance whatsoever. AI tools, when utilized correctly, work too well not to use them. Both of these sites boasted features and animation which were a joy to handcraft.

I worked with Rare Volume on a fun project for AT&T. It was a live Internet speed test which pitted your phone against an iPad connected AT&T's 5G UW network. It was an actual race with real results, backed by real time visuals with pre-rendered quality... because the real time visuals largely were pre-rendered. I developed a system for coordinating layers of videos with premultiplied alpha using a custom codec based on research out of a university lab in the Netherlands. The end result was an experience which was beautiful and could perform well on mediocre hardware.