Howdy! I'm Kyle. I'm a podcasting enthusiast, ghost engineer, storyteller, mad scientist, and part-time mercenary with a passion for podcast technology, user experience design, and wicked design thinking. I strive to make a small dent in the podcasting universe through creative innovation. From producing dramatic podcasts to building simplified tech solutions, Iām always driven to make podcasting easier.
My first Big Application experience came when I was doing Freelance PHP development with my first company Leafbreeze Productions. I contracted with a small design firm called Sparkplug in Portland, Oregon, to build them a prototype application called TeamSnap.
I took a design idea from Sparkplug and built TeamToolKit/TeamSnap into a successful sports team management SaaS application. During the project, I convinced Sparkplug to reconsider coaches as the customer and the person most invested in managing the team. While they orginially thought the application would be run by a team manager or a team parent, the UX interview proved that coaches were the ones that needed an automated online solution for organizing their teams and groups online.
The end result was a TeamSnap working prototype, developed as a PHP/MySQL LAMP application that focused on a coaches perspective of their amateur team. Sparkplug then turned around and sold the prototype to a private investor who turned the application into US$20-million Software-as-a-Service company based in Boulder, Colorado. The current version of the application still has many of the features I helped create.
The TeamSnap experience taught me how enjoyable developing Software-as-a-Service applications could be. Especially when I could work with others using a whiteboard, butcher-paper sketch pads, and paper-based demos to brainstorm functions, workflows, and features.
I love telling stories and teaching niche audiences interesting ways to look at wicked problems. That's why I find talking at conferences is a perfect way to streamline an idea, test its validity, and gain instant feedback. Sometimes the crazier the talk, the better the feedback!
I started my experimentation talks with WordPress. My first real technical talk was at a WordCamp event in Asheville, North Carolina, with the introduction of WordPress Multisite (WPMU) Design Patterns in a talk I called Monsters of WordPress. From there I explored the possibility of simplifying WPMU installations by experimenting with turn-key solutions and plugins that could combine and separate WPMU network sites. Unfortunately, few developers were interested in using WordPress Multisite due to its wicked complexity. It was an idea before its time.
I've founded a few small businesses in my day. One of these companies was Reckoneer. I built Reckoneer from a blog into an outdoor racing company, that taught new race directors the business of endurance racing, race promotion and event production. It was through Reckoneer that I started podcasting with the creation of my highly successful podcast Merchants of Dirt.
My adventures in podcasting and audio technology led me to create Gagglepod. What started as a podcasting education meetup turned into a production studio I co-founded with Timothy Kimo Brien. Through Gagglepod we held hundreds of meetups and virtual coaching seminars that taught new podcasters how to create shows, use audio technology, and build good podcasts.
Tim and I turned lessons learned from Gagglepod into a weekly podcasted called Podwrecked. Podwrecked was our way of helping other podcasters survive their podcasts. It also helped us try other new ventures in public speaking, podcast genre experiments, and multiple ways to record outside of a studio. I would then take everything we learned and tested on the road as a featured speaker at several podcasting conferences such as Podfest Expo, Podcast Global, Independent Podcast Conference (ICON), Mid-Atlantic Podcast Conference (MAPCON), GalaxyCon and several WordCamps. View several of my most recent talks on my Gagglepod YouTube Channel.
One of my secret passions is the creation of audio dramas. It all started when I took a 30-day challenge to make a daily Audio Drama. The end result was PAUSE for Dramatic Effect, a 17-episode serial podcast that let me have fun with writing, directing, producing, and even voice acting. Since then, I have been writing scripts that will become future audio dramas that will be produced by Oncetold.
When I'm not mountain biking, I'm reading about the American Civil War. As a big Civil War enthusiast I created War Yankee - Overland, a history podcast that explored the Overland Campaign of 1864, as a way to explore the battlefields that surrounded my home in Fredericksburg, Virginia. The podcast includes music and sound effects to create a historical soundscape, making learning about history more engaging.
Many of my personal lessons learned are explored in my podcast Not Easily Squished. In this on-going series I give listeners advice on how to take fragile podcast idea and transform it into fierce audio concept. All the podcast education that I've researched, tested, and experienced with Not Easily Squished, Podwrecked, and all podcasting talks will soon be a book called Not Easily Squished.
Another experiment I have taken on was creating the Flowgnar podcast. I wanted a soundtrack that I could use when riding my mountain bike that featured local and independent music. Flowgnar became the result and is one of only a dozen Value4Value music podcasts and was essential in helping me build several Podcasting 2.0 features into the Oncetold platform.
After almost a decade of podcasting I decided to take all my podcasting experience and use it to build a new kind of podcast hosting platform. The goal was to simplify the complicated world of podcasting by not giving a new podcaster all the bells and whistles other hosting provides have. Instead, Oncetold became the opposite by prescribing a very narrow path that removed all the distraction.
To build Oncetold, however, I had to turn my focus back to relearning how Software-as-a-Service was built. I also had to update my programming skills and relearn JavaScript, Node, and Vue. Thankfully, my day job had pushed me into being heavily involved in supporting Enterprise migrations of on-site applications into Google Cloud Platform (GCP) environments. That push greatly impact my ablity to leverage my GCP knowledge to create Oncetold using Firebase/Firestore, Cloud Run Functions, and dynamic RSS feeds.
Building Oncetold took me right back to how much I loved building TeamSnap to long ago. There is no other kind of wicked puzzle that comes close to the challenge of designing a SaaS platform. Turns out I love redesigning overcomplicated parts of software systems and new ways to break it down.
I've also really become fascinated with understanding what can be learned from failing fast. I've made thousands of mistakes and found a thousand more dead ends. But each failure opens the door to all sorts of new ways you have never considered before had you not tired.
Writing was a challenge for me growing up with Dyslexia. However, my experience in the US Navy retrained my mind to overcome it. Now I enjoy writing. I've even been featured in all five volumes of 100 Livestreaming & Digital Media Predictions by Ross Brand. My most recent contributions were in Volume 4 (#97 ā "Whispers Through Time") and Volume 5 (#34 ā "In a World of AI Slop, Be the Human"). .
When I'm not learning something new, I'm hanging out with my Best Girl, learning from my kids, playing rocks with my granddaugher, chasing my trail monsters, or off mountain biking across Northern Texas on my trusty stead, Chickensaurus Rex: A 2019 Kona HeiHei CR/DL full-suspension mountain bike.
Who knows what tomorrow's wicked problem will bring me. Hopefully, it will be enough to start another ruckus!
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