Why I Left Springfield
My mom has COPD. She needs to be somewhere with warm, dry air. I need to be somewhere I can build without burning cash. Tucson checks both boxes.
So I loaded the Jeep, picked up my mom in Springfield, and drove west. Through Dodge City and Santa Fe and the whole long stretch of the American Southwest until we hit the saguaros.
I'd been thinking about this for years — building something of my own instead of building other people's systems. Twenty-six years of enterprise software for P&G, Starbucks, Coca-Cola. Good work. Invisible work. The kind where nobody notices unless something breaks.
The drive gave me time to think about what I actually wanted to build. Not another SaaS. Not another consultancy. Something that calculates when other software guesses. Something you own.
Tucson smells like creosote after rain. That was the first thing I noticed.