With the new year upon us, I've decided to use this arbitrary date boundary as an excuse to force myself to experiment with some new technologies. As a result, I've decided to start a little #BuildInPublic challenge for myself that I'm calling 12 in 21.
What I love about Transistor.fm đź’›
Similar to creating a website, starting a podcast requires that you have a hosting service to serve up your audio files. A lot of people I talk to, who are interested in starting a podcast, don't realize this extra step. I think a lot of the time they just assume that iTunes acts as the "YouTube of podcasts" and has you upload your audio files directly.


As I gear up for some big things in 2021, I wanted to create a centralized portfolio website with links out to all of my various side-projects. I really like seeing people share those spreadsheets with a timeline of all their side projects, and I think I'll probably still do something like that here, but I also wanted a standalone website to really showcase the quality of my projects. My goal is to one day for a company around this SchoonLabs branding, and use it as an umbrella company over my various endeavours. Until then, check out some of the exciting projects I'm working on!
Hacking away on Trusting.co over the weekend...
Some friends recently reached out to me for help creating an MVP (minimum viable product) for a software idea they had to help families share information. I spent a bunch of time this Saturday hacking away at some new features for that app.
Coming soon at https://Trusting.co!
Living Security Intelligence - Contact Tracing
This "Contact Tracing" trend is ramping up quickly! There seems to be a lot of support for it by governments around the world. Is this a short-term saving grace, and possibly a long-term privacy liability? The Living Security team and I wanted to put together a quick video explaining exactly what Contact Tracing is, and open it up to a broader discussion.
âť“ I'm curious, what does everyone think about it âť“
Blog Post - https://bit.ly/covid-contact-tracing
So excited to announce our Series A funding round! We've partnered with some amazing investors and will continue to deliver the solutions you need for your #SecurityAwareness program!
#ExperienceSecurity #LivingSecurity #Cybersecurity #training #SeriesA— Living Security (@Living_Security) April 8, 2020

Rather than learning all about the podcasting ecosystem by myself in a bubble, I want to share what I've learned the last couple of days so others who just getting started won't need to start at square one as well. This led me to the idea of creating an "open source" list of podcasting tools and services for others to use as an initial starting point.
Happy Hacktober
What's that? You've never heard of Hacktober? Me either! Well, that is until yesterday, October 1st. Let's investigate this new internet phenomenon together...
The start of a new chapter!
After 6.5 amazing years, today is my last day working for Lithium Technologies / Khoros. I've had an amazing time working here, with truly some of the smartest, and hardest working people in the world. I can't even begin to describe how much I've grown and managed to learn from them all over the years.
I'm a Product Engineer
I often have a difficult time trying to describe my dream position for this stage of my career. Over the last 3 years I've managed, through a series of fortunate breaks, to put myself in the closest position I could convince my employer to put me. But when I have a discussion with someone about what I "want" to do, I typically just fallback to some boring cookie-cutter industry-wide title such as "frontend engineer". But what if I want to be so much more than that? This is why I'm going to start working towards a new job title for myself, a "product engineer".
ClippPlayer & React-Waves
With the world's growing interest in virtual assistants, I've been wanting to experiment with more audio-based technologies. This is how my original idea for my clip.ps project got started. I wanted to build something where users could upload audio clips, splice them together, and tell their story.