About Jeremy
A programmer, wanderer, and tinkerer.
Jeremy Boles lives in Springfield, in southwest Missouri, and has done so for longer than most people consider healthy. He’s been working with computers since before they could easily talk to each other to plot his demise, most recently at Cloudflare. In a past life he ran a small software studio and consultancy called Central Standard out of an old, beat-up camper in his backyard. Perhaps one day it will rise again.
He’s happiest on the move, somewhere he hasn’t been. Given the choice, he’d rather be in the middle seat of a cramped six-hour flight across an ocean than in a costly ergonomic chair staring at the screen of a $2,500 computer. Before the pandemic he had a personal goal of leaving the country once a year, and he managed it, until the world fell apart.
Prone to tinker and to start new hobbies, Jeremy suffers intense bouts of executive dysfunction and focus mismanagement. Periodically people can exploit his spells of hyper-focus, and sometimes, when it benefits them, pay him vast sums of cash to make use of that state of mind. These folks typically can’t understand why he’s incapable of enabling or disabling this feature of his brain on a whim. He empathizes with his overseers about this, in the manner of someone with Stockholm syndrome.
Lately the hyper-focus has produced Napkin, a notepad calculator that reads the way a person writes, and Owl, a word processor for netbooks nobody else wants. Both are attempts to make the computer work for him rather than the other way around, which he would call a philosophy if it weren’t so plainly a temperament.
Many a wordsmith will bemoan that writing a biography in the third person is difficult, and dislike the inevitability of it feeling necessary. Jeremy would like the reader to know that he dislikes it too.
Hello there. I live in a smallish city in southwest Missouri, inside the United States of Advertising. I’ve been making websites since the late 1990s, and before you ask: yes, I do feel partially responsible for the mess we’re in out here. I also recognize that saying so is a tad self-important and gives me far too much credit.
I’m not really on social media these days, so the best way to reach me is me@jeremyboles.com. There’s a public GPG key if you’d like to use it.
I work out of an atelier upstairs in the Warren, a 1904 Foursquare I share with my kids. For years before that it was a vintage camper parked behind a 1920s bungalow, and I never did finish the inside of it. Truth be told, I would usually rather be about anywhere else than where I currently am.