I’m Don Burnside — a learning specialist, longtime podcaster, and cycIist. I build local-first tools that make creative work easier, and I’ve been talking into microphones and breaking the internet (in small, reversible ways) since the early 2000s.
Before all this, I co-founded White Roof Radio, one of the longest-running independent automotive podcasts , built around the MINI Cooper community. Over its 17-year run, we recorded hundreds of episodes, live shows, and enough inside jokes to fill a service manual.
Along the way, I wrote, coded, and designed things: WordPress sites, training programs, Python apps, and a few questionable interfaces that only I loved.
Today I work as a Learning Specialist at Axway, helping people make sense of complex tools and workflows. Nights and weekends are for my own projects — like Voxsmith, FlowPath, and [insert third thing here, that is really cool but I’m not talking about it yet], all born from the same itch: I get tired of doing things by hand, so I build tools to fix that.
This site’s been online for more than twenty years, in one form or another. It’s my home base — the place I post what I’m working on, what I’m learning, and the things that keep me curious. No algorithms, no social scoring, just the long game of making things.