About Colin (2013)

This verison of my "About Me" page was written in late 2013, prior to a lot of things changing in my life: having a baby, founding a startup company, etc.

I was born in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, on a Sunday, three weeks before I was expected to arrive, which is funny to me, because nowadays, I am typically a couple minutes late whenever I’m headed somewhere.

My family moved to New Jersey when I was very young, and I spent all of my formative years in the Garden State. In addition to me, there are lots of amazing things from my home state, like football, the spaces on the Monopoly board, the motion picture camera, telephones, the better Kevin Smith movies, and Danny freakin’ DeVito!

I am an only child, which is every bit as great as you thought it’d be when you tried to wish away your siblings as a kid, but carries with it a lot of additional responsibility. It also means I had a lot of gently-used board games in my closet growing up, because there weren’t brothers or sisters around to play with. Oh! And the minute detail that if you let your parents down, there’s nobody else to pick up the slack.

Growing Up… I was a excellent student in school and I played outside a lot. From a young age, I created wildly over-detailed sports and game leagues with elaborate rules, rankings, and stats. This started simply as “SBF” (Soccer, Baseball Football) on my street in Edison, NJ, then the “Summer Soccer League” in Branchburg, but grew into things like “Beotch Ball” — a game played in dorms between two people with a rule book over five single-spaced pages long, an official world ranking system, and more than three completed tournaments. This would eventually spur WOSoMP, the Weekend Olympic Showdown of Massive Proportions in my adult life.

I attended college at the University of Delaware in Newark, DE, majoring in Computer Science. To this day, UD is one of my favorite places on earth, and it’s where I forged some of my best and longest-lasting friendships. Most notably, I met my future wife while attending, but we didn’t become an item until years later. While in school, I was a Resident Assistant my junior and senior years and followed a passion for that work to a year of grad school as a Hall Director. I also started a band, called Monica’s Ghost, with four of my best friends. We’ve played two shows ever and that was at least one too many.

After school I moved back home with my parents for a few years as I started my professional life. I can expound on the benefits and greatness of Central New Jersey for hours, but suburbia can be a bit less than exciting for a 23 year old post-grad. I made the best of it, learning everything I could at my job and trying a few new things like playing a spy in a local theater production and getting that WOSoMP thing started.

After a bit of time…, I broke out of my comfort zone and moved to San Francisco and became the fourth employee of a startup company. I wanted something different and I wanted to experience living in a city and there’s no reason to not do something in your life that feels right, makes sense, and seems like a great next step. Around the time I put my move in motion, I started a romantic relationship with my best friend, Liz. We’d been spending a lot of time together over the prior year, and my moving west was the catalyst for the two of us to admit our feelings for one another and get together. A few months after I moved, she was able to join me, and we hit the west together. We lived together in San Francisco for nearly three years. It was an amazing experience, almost like a “second college,” at least socially. We met many friends, tried new things, and forged our romantic relationship.

We moved back east… in the summer of 2010. We planned our wedding and settled into an apartment (and later a house) in Philadelphia. Our time living back east has been enriching. Being closer to family and our core friend group has yielded many benefits, and we’ve been able to continue exploring city life at a lower cost than in SF. While I sometimes miss the west coast, I know I’m where I want to be and taking the steps I want to take in life.

For those with deeper interest, you might enjoy this list of curious facts about me:

I have a history of sporadically updating my blog and/or neglecting it for months and years on end. Should you subscribe to this site in your news reader, there’s no reason to fear you’d be overwhelmed ;–)

If you just can’t stop reading about me:

You can read versions of this profile from different years: 2023, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2013, 2010