I'm Ron. I make software by day, and notes about software by night.

Before product management had a name I'd heard of.

I grew up in Richmond, Virginia in the 90s, in a household that prized “interesting” over “successful.” My dad built things in his office. My mom asked why. My parents had us in the library more than the toy store, and the fantasy section was a portal. Final Fantasy VII was a religious experience.

Somewhere around fourth grade I checked out a book on programming your own video games, brought it home, hammered out a number-guessing game on the family computer, and announced to my parents, with the gravity of a kid declaring sainthood, that I would be a game developer.

They laughed. (Reasonably.)

I spent the next decade nurturing that hobby in secret while leading marching bands, jazz bands, step teams, and a breakdancing crew at Virginia Tech. Early lessons in getting people to do hard things together that I didn't know would become the actual job description later. On April 16, 2007, the morning of the Virginia Tech shooting, I learned in the most permanent way available that life is short, love is the point, and you should be the light when you can.

I graduated, got on a plane, and flew out west to make video games at Microsoft. (They put me on Internet Explorer.)

The long detour, where I learned what a product manager actually does.

Microsoft hired me into QA on Internet Explorer, where I spent two years learning corporate culture by accidentally calling our VP an intern, shipping the browser's first private mode (Ctrl+Shift+P, you're welcome), and slowly realizing I'd rather make things than break them. I fought my way over to Xbox and got pulled onto a secret project called Natal, which became Kinect. Millions of living rooms. Skeletal tracking. The brief, beautiful era when waving at your TV felt like the future.

That was where I figured out what a PM is actually for: almost every “strategy problem” is really a clarity problem, and someone just has to decide what the thing is.

In 2014 I left for Riot Games. League of Legends had taken over my brain, and watching Worlds at Staples felt like seeing the future of sports. I joined the esports team and ran global events for four years. Seoul, Berlin, São Paulo, Shanghai. I learned how to manage a team. I learned how to lose sleep. I learned how to mistake “work-life integration” for a personality.

In May 2018, I walked into a Monday morning meeting and got fired.

I won't pretend that was anything other than a gut-punch. I spent a few days staring at the ceiling watching the word FIRED in 80-point font. And then, because I am apparently the kind of person who responds to crisis by building something, I started a tiny indie game studio called Block Party, shipped a couple of titles, and reminded myself that the thing I actually love is making, not titles.

Meta, and the slow realization that the hardware was the easy part.

I joined Oculus in 2019, which became Reality Labs in 2021, and have been on Quest the whole time. Three headset generations, a few platform rewrites, and a recent stretch leading input and interaction work.

Building for a headset is a particular kind of hard. There are no incumbent conventions to lean on. Every decision ripples into a dozen adjacent ones you didn't see coming. We borrow what we can from phones, desktops, and tablets, but most of the work is taste.

The thing that surprised me most wasn't the technology. It was realizing the frontier of what this medium could do had stopped being a technical question. It's a question of which problems are worth solving, and what we want a person to do once they put one on. Which, weirdly, is where this all loops back around to writing.

The Substack, the vault, and the system I didn't mean to build.

I started writing publicly in 2019, mostly because I needed a place to think out loud. The Degenerate, the Substack, is where I work in public: field notes from Quest, essays on AI-assisted productivity, dispatches from whichever rabbit hole I'm in this week. I call subscribers Degenerates. (They seem to like it.)

Somewhere in 2024, the notes I'd been keeping in Obsidian quietly became a system. The system became a second brain. The second brain became a stack of Claude Code experiments and Python scripts duct-taped to my calendar that wakes me up with a daily brief. I named it RonOS, because at some point I realized I wasn't just optimizing my life, I was building a witness for it.

This site is the front porch of all of it. Posts, projects, the parts I can show. The interesting stuff lives in the vault. I'll keep pushing the better bits out here.