Howdy 👋
Name’s Raymond. Most people call me Ray, or Ray Ray, or if you go back far enough, Interweb Rockstar. That one started as a handle on a gamer radio station I was on air for as a teenager, playing 80s music at lunch and hard rock at night and taking requests from people I’d only ever met as forum avatars. I liked the name enough to go register the domain for it. This was before “personal brand” was a phrase anyone said out loud, so I’ve been doing this longer than it’s had a name. I’ve decided to count that as a head start rather than a warning sign.
So this is the new place. If you followed a link here from Bytes & Burgers, it’s the same person and the same stuff with a new sign on the door.
The short version
I make things. I’ve been making things on the internet since I was a kid in rural Indiana with a dial-up connection I mostly acquired without asking, and I have not stopped since. That’s not a figure of speech. There has genuinely never been a stretch of my life where I wasn’t in the middle of building something. Websites, magazines, companies, communities, a handful of things that worked and a long, colorful list of things that didn’t.
Somewhere in the middle of all that I also spent years taking apart scams that hurt regular people, mostly the cloud-mining and crypto operations that promised returns that didn’t add up. A few of them offered me good money to look the other way. I turned it down and wrote about them instead. Some of those people went to federal prison. I’m not going to pretend that wasn’t satisfying.
Where it started
My dad was a process engineer. When I was young he’d take me onto the factory floor at night, hard hat and all, and show me the simulation software they used to model changes to the line. You’d test a new layout on a computer, find the better version, then build it for real. That turned out to be the whole way I think, and I didn’t clock it as a lesson until about twenty years later. Model the system. Look for the gap between how it claims to work and how it actually works. Use the gap to make something, fix something, or occasionally get a couple of men in suits to show up at your parents’ front door.
The gap thing started early. I wrote quiz programs in BASIC for my third-grade teachers because they didn’t know what else to do with me. I found my way onto the internet through a backdoor at the public library before my parents knew the internet existed. I won radio call-in contests over and over by reverse-engineering how the station picked winners, right up until they changed the rules specifically because of me. By 14 I’d incorporated a real company around a tech review site, which is a sentence that sounds a lot better than the reality of doing your own taxes in high school.
Why the new site
I stepped back from being publicly visible for a good while. Part of that story is mine to tell and part of it isn’t yet, so I’ll leave it there. The part that matters is that I’m back, I’m using my real name, and I’m rebuilding the record of what I’ve actually done. On my own terms this time, instead of leaving it to whoever felt like writing it for me.
That’s most of what this site is. Stories from a genuinely strange career. What I’ve picked up helping founders and creators over twenty-odd years, a lot of it given away free because the people who need the advice most are usually the ones who can’t cut a check for it. And opinions, about an industry that romanticizes itself dishonestly, and a tech landscape that’s increasingly built so you can’t actually own the things you make.
Underneath all of it is one idea I genuinely believe, which is that every person is a creator. That’s not a tagline, it’s the reason for the whole thing. If you’re reading this at 11pm working on something nobody around you understands, you’re not the only one doing that, and the rest of us are findable.
Want to talk?
There’s going to be a booking page here where you can grab time on my calendar. It doesn’t exist yet, because I got the site up first. That’s the order I do things in, and apparently always have. Check back, or come find me on social in the meantime.
Your Interweb Rockstar,
Ray Ray