Hi! I'm a software engineer, a photographer, and an aspiring wilderness ranger. My online gallery is at photos.vangorkom.org and you can email me directly for more information about my art prints.

For those who partake, you can find my (nerdy) social media activity on Mastodon and my (normal) activity on Threads.

Posts

• What's Next? Head of Engineering at iNaturalist

  Late in 2013, I met a remarkable group of people building an app so inspiring that I couldn’t think of working on anything else. I left Forge Apps, my software consulting company, and joined them in delivering uniquely personalized fitness guidance for users. It was a mission so purely good that I often, only half-jokingly, say that I would have joined the team without pay. We built it and it helped people. We were acquired multiple times and expanded our mission beyond fitness to encompass all of human health, and I believed that journey was the best decade of my career.

  I resigned myself to the probability that I’d never again work on something so good, and that I should just grind out jobs until I could retire to become a wilderness ranger. I was wrong.

  After a long-overdue sabbatical break (including a delightful return to my alma mater) I’ve joined iNaturalist as Head of Engineering. iNaturalist is the premier platform for connecting people with nature while advancing science and conservation. Our community is unlike any other, as we work together to record the world around us and help each other learn about it. I’ve been a contributor for years, and when I tell random people about some cool thing out in nature, it’s often because interactions on iNat have turned my book knowledge into practical understanding.

  In a way, iNaturalist is the ranger I dream of becoming: connecting people and protecting nature, but using technology to reach millions—far beyond the number I could ever talk to on trails. Our team is fantastic, our community and volunteers are inspiring, and it’s exactly where I want to contribute my engineering abilities for as long as possible. I’m full of gratitude, humbled, and thrilled to be part of this mission.

• Sierra Nevada Aurora

  

  These photos of the aurora caused by May 2024’s incredible solar events were taken at relatively low altitude (by Sierra Nevada standards) in California’s Sonora Pass.

  More photos at: https://photos.vangorkom.org/Events/2024/May-2024-Aurora

• First photo print exhibition, at my favorite local brewery.

  

• Finished reading: Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains by Jon Krakauer 📚

  A good look into the wider extremes of climbing. I was particularly fascinated by ice climbing, culture in the alps, and the challenges of measuring mountain heights.

• Pair of Juvenile Great Horned Owls in a Backyard Coast Redwood Tree

  After their parents left, these two juvenile Great Horned Owls sat in one of our Coast Redwood trees, staring at us and clinging to branches in the wind. At one point, a turkey vulture perched nearby and stared at them for several minutes before flying into the neighboring tree and thrashing about. It startled the owls, but didn’t stay long before flying away.

  We’ve been watching the adults and listening to the whole owl family for months, but this was our first sighting of the juveniles. It’s wonderful that they still have enough habitat to reproduce, as the number of trees in the neighborhood has fallen by more than half over the past few years.

  Adult Great Horned Owl perched below two juveniles

  More photos of the Great Horned Owl family

  

• Yosemite Falls, Morning Reflections

  Morning light and a reflection of Yosemite Falls pouring into the valley, flooded by spring snowmelt. The Merced River’s calm surface belies incredible flows as it covers the meadows.

  

  More photos of Yosemite Valley

• Memory

  

  remnant of logging 100 years ago, a stump in the University of California, Santa Cruz’s campus nature preserve

• Finished reading: What’s Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies by Tim Urban 📚

  This is a challenging and helpful book. There are certainly more factors going on, but Tim’s lens of Golems vs. Genies explains so much of what’s wrong in modern politics. Worthy of a re-read and further reflection.

• Finished reading: Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey 📚

  Great read; captivating prose. Reconnected me to childhood memories of watching Westerns with my grandfather, and added a new appreciation for the tropes this book originated. I’m thankful we now represent women as more than caricatures.

• California Coast on Memorial Day, North of Santa Cruz

  

• Final Cut Pro 10.6.6 Update: Tone Mapping for HDR Video

  When Final Cut Pro for iPad was announced, I started hoping for a Mac update today too, and Apple didn’t disappoint. Highlights from the release notes:

  • Use automatic color management to easily edit HDR and SDR clips in the same project, with intelligent tone mapping of video to match your color space.
  • Improve your color correction workflow with the Color Adjustments effect, and apply new color presets to give your clips a particular look.

  My recent experiment using Premiere Pro for video editing was buggy and frustrating overall, but its automatic tone mapping was worth it, as I’d never been happy with my manual efforts in Final Cut Pro. If this new feature works as well as I expect, it’ll let me stick with FCP for everything. If not, I guess I’ll try Davinci Resolve.

  I record footage in HLG or LOG formats to capture maximum information, but distributing the high-quality output is still complicated and slow, and currently only practical via YouTube. Automatic tone-mapping will let me produce a standard-definition version for wide distribution almost instantly.

• Bridalveil Falls Rainbow

  

• Last day of high school today for our youngest.

  Proud of her for a million reasons, and excited for the next chapter: pursuing an interdisciplinary degree in Cognitive Studies.

  She’ll probably lead us in the war vs. AGI, or be the infernal thing’s creator. Whatever. I’ll be her proud dad either way.

• The previous post is hereby revised and amended with this vastly superior post.

  The Big Dipper pointing down at El Capitan, with the flash of a climber’s headlamp at Camp 6, a mere 4 pitches from from the top.

  

• El Capitan, After Sunset

  
• Incredible work by Cal Fire over the past few years to save this neighborhood deep in the forests just west of Yosemite.

  My first time editing a video with Premiere Pro. No sound, and I recommend watching at 2x speed.

• Finished reading: Touching the Void by Joe Simpson 📚 (also the excellent 2003 docudrama)

  An intense story of superhuman perseverance, cycling between hope and certain doom as each fresh misfortune befell the climbers. Inspiring, but my alpine adventures will continue keeping far from the void.

• 

  Great Blanketflower

  Gaillardia aristata

• A Rock Climbing Naturalist Engineer's Micro(photo)blog

  About 72 minutes into the latest episode of the Accidental Tech Podcast, John Siracusa mentions Rust programmers, Mac people, and rock climbers as circles of varying disjointedness in a social network of tech nerds.

  I laughed, because I’ve been coding in Rust and Swift lately, and I was literally half way up a wall at the climbing gym at that moment.

  I’m into a lot of different things, beyond engineering and rock climbing. Writing a succinct bio for my social media has always been a challenge, and it keeps getting worse. Eventually the stress of competing roles:

  • personal or professional?
  • engineer or manager?
  • technologist or naturalist?
  • park ranger or photographer?

  …combined with self-imposed pressure to meet expectations, and sucked all the joy out of posting. I took a snapshot of a nice flower this morning and didn’t post it because…umm…what if it wasn’t on-brand? What if it wasn’t good enough? Would I bore someone?

  That was the wrong way to think.

  My other websites will be more focused, but this microblog is going to have it all, like a public journal should. I’ll consider it a success if at least half the posts here are interesting to any given person, but it’ll be enough that they’re all interesting to me.

  Thanks for taking a look.

  

• Probably a minor character, but one of the constructs in Tears of the Kingdom broke the 4th wall and spoke right to me.

  So I made a silly little tribute: https://rangerconstruct.com

  
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