It all started with a US Robotics Palm Pilot 5000. It wasn’t even my Palm Pilot…

A friend of mine brought her brand new Palm Pilot 5000 to work one day. I played with the new toy for a few minutes, and the question immediately popped into my head:

I wonder if I can read a book on this thing?

And so it began.

Flash forward many, many years, and now I’m looking at a desk piled high with eReading devices and tablets.

Turns out that yes, yes you could read a book on a Palm Pilot 5000…

I’ve always played with text and content. I was raised as a bookworm and spent a significant portion of my childhood running around the university library while my mom worked in the circulation department. I worked as a page layout technician when I graduated from college. In those days, we did page layout with galley proofs, a calculator, a couple of different pens, and a pica stick.

So it’s not surprising that I wound up working in digital content, or that I specialized in XML stylesheet development as a consultant, or that making the lead from paper to digital seemed like a natural progression in my reading life.

One book is never enough. And digital content processing technologies just get more interesting over time. 25 years later and I'm still a tenacious bookworm with a habit of solving digital content problems with a shift-left accessible approach toward workflow development.