I started building for the web before graphical interfaces were the norm. Thirty years later I still ship every line myself — the difference is what a single person can now operate.
01 — The newspaper years
WNC Times is Marjorie’s paper — she has run it since 2000. My part was the admin side, and it cost me little, because it was the same work I did every day for clients. Over 20,000 articles about Western North Carolina — council meetings, floods, school boards, the things a place actually runs on. A newspaper teaches you two things software people relearn slowly: deadlines are real, and accountability has a name on it.
02 — The agency
While she ran the newsroom, I ran Farrington Development — an independent boutique agency doing web development, CRM integrations, and SEO, continuously, for twenty solid years. Alongside the client work I launched hundreds of projects of my own: some still running, some shelved on GitHub, a few waiting to be reconstituted. Every disruption the industry produced in those years, I had my hands in.
03 — The rebuild
The paper ran on Joomla until it couldn't. I rebuilt it on Next.js, and the rebuild changed the question. It stopped being "how do I keep my paper alive" and became "why can't anyone run one of these?"
04 — The platform
NewsroomAIOS is that answer: a multi-tenant platform for AI-powered local newspapers. 17 papers across 16 markets ran a successful two-month beta — A/B tested, finalized, launching September 1, 2026 — most run by operators who aren't me. The pipeline runs multiple models with an anti-slop framework — source grounding, per-publication voice packs, second-pass linting, and a human editor accountable for every word that publishes.
05 — The thesis
Everything I build is the same idea: human orchestration of machine labor. OCTI, my fork of the OpenClaw runtime, gates every plan turn behind human approval. The newsroom pipeline ends at an editor. The Command Center puts one operator in front of all of it. I don't automate people out of the loop — I build harnesses that keep a human at the gate.
06 — Now
Today it's the studio (Farrington Development), the platform, GetFound3 for AI-search visibility, and OCTI. One person, six systems, Asheville. What I'm working on this month is on the /now page.