NOTE: This website is growing weeds, I've barely touched it in years. Consider yourself warned!

About Todd Gehman

  • Contact
    Write to me at
  • Stalk
    Facebook Icon Flickr Icon LinkedIn Icon Twitter Icon
  • Home
    Ballard, Seattle, WA
  • Popped Out
    Ephrata, PA on August 16, 1970. Apparently it was a very good year for Bordeaux. I would like to pretend that that means something.
  • Favorite Things
    William Eggleston, The Beatles, popcorn, e.e. cummings, Charlie Kaufman, KEXP
  • Bio

    I was just a kid when my childhood began.

    [Years pass.]

    Escaping my little hometown in Amish Country for the somewhat more liberal pastures of State College (actual name of an actual town), I tried dropping the math nerd schtick, studying the liberal arts, growing out my hair, and so on. I got so adept at critical thinking while at Penn State that I eventually turned a critical eye on state school liberal arts education. Skipped town, headed West.

    I settled in Seattle, planning to resume nerdhood by studying the cold, hard sciences at Shoreline Community College. While pursuing chemistry and physics, a series of menial jobs eventually lead to a menial job at a Homebrew Shop, where I was able to chit-chat microbiology and teach myself web development by building their online store. The website-building lead to a life-altering and all-consuming job at Amazon.com, for which I gave up night school entirely.

    Six years on, I left Amazon to join some other ex-Amazonians at the Robot Co-op, helping to build the goal-oriented site 43 Things, by which I was inspired to skydive, write and record my own songs, and take up night school again. That time it was photography.

    Just as I got a proper visual arts orientation, the web progressed beyond flat, ugly, barely usable interfaces, I spent some time hacking up websites as a developer for small but mighty design firm Urban Influence.

    I now write software for Vittana, where we circumvent the inequities in the global banking industry and use microfinance to provide student loans in the developing world where they'd otherwise be difficult or impossible to get.

    [Years pass.]

    I have yet to settle on an epitaph, but here are three contenders:

    • Made it the whole way through without therapy.
    • I would rather be here than in Florida.
    • I had a lover's duel with the world. (A riff on Robert Frost's)