family
Family.
The reason any of this matters. The first people who said yes when no one else would — the ones who taught me what “right person for the job” actually means.
i · the short version
The short version.
Springfield, Missouri. Marine Corps first, then a long stretch of software — Rust where it matters, English where it matters more. The parts that don’t fit on an intake form:
service
Marine Corps.
Supply lines break. Plans don’t survive contact. The enemy gets a vote. Everything I learned in the Corps, I ended up needing as a software engineer.
work in hand
Hand-built.
Circuits, antennas, firmware, garden sensors, ham radio rigs, tube amps, code that runs on devices nobody thought would host it. If I can solder it, compile it, or cast it, I’m interested.
track record
Track record.
A hand-built local-first software stack — Rust and WASM, no cloud required. LoRa gateways, BLE fabric, sensor mesh: raw signal turned into useful decisions, on-device. Quiet work for people who need it; ask for references if we’re a fit.
“I’m your huckleberry.”
— Doc Holliday (Val Kilmer), Tombstone, 1993
In 19th-century American slang, being someone’s huckleberry meant being the right person for the job. Doc says it to Johnny Ringo to accept the challenge. It’s a yes. It’s an acceptance. It’s the right man, stepping forward.
The desert isn’t a theme, it’s a plan. Mom and me, starting over where the air is dry and the sunsets don’t quit.
The desert of the real.
ii · the books
Two books in hand.
Three more in the works.
The flagship pair — Near Enough and The Eigen Doctrine — with the rest of the shelf behind them. Chapter one of Near Enough is free to read; print editions direct from the author are on the way.
Near Enough: How Hyperdimensional Computing Makes Software Feel Like Cheating
The engineer’s guide to geometry-first software
Hyperdimensional computing — HDC — is a different kind of algebra. Instead of looking things up in tables, you project them into a space where similarity is distance. The engineer’s field guide to that algebra: where it comes from, how to implement it in Rust, and why it makes distributed systems, edge devices, and AI pipelines feel like they’re cheating.
Coming soon
The Eigen Doctrine — Volume I: Invariant Truth
Find the invariant truth. Say it plainly.
A working manual of philosophy — not a survey for the seminar. Twenty-six centuries of inquiry read as a single sustained argument about what does not change when much else does.
Ask about the book →iii · the scans
Real places, measured.
Three actual sites, scanned in the field — real 3D Gaussian splats you can walk around in your browser. Every point is a measurement, not a guess from a prompt. Drag to orbit. Scroll to zoom. Pick a place below.
Gaussian splatting · iPhone (Scaniverse) · rendered in your browser with three.js + Spark, served from this site — no CDN, no cloud.
Tucson Mountain District
689,962 measured points, captured on an iPhone in the Tucson Mountain District — the western unit of Saguaro National Park, past Gates Pass, on the bajada below Wasson Peak. Every point is a measurement, not a guess.
Red Rock State Park, Sedona
Oak Creek red-rock country outside Sedona, Arizona — a scan of one of the sandstone outcrops the park is built on. The color that reads as almost cartoonish in a photo turns out to be exactly what the rock is: iron-oxide crust on Schnebly Hill sandstone.
Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield
Fifteen minutes south of the house — the field where the first major Civil War battle west of the Mississippi was fought on August 10th, 1861. Home country, and the place I go when I need the quiet kind of long view.
Where it stands.
That saguaro grows in the Tucson Mountain District of Saguaro National Park — the park’s western unit, out past Gates Pass on the bajada below Wasson Peak. The map is real: USGS elevation, contours traced from the raw grid, hillshade from the same — every line a measurement, same as the splat. No map tiles, no CDN.
32.26°N, 111.17°W · Saguaro NP West · Tucson, Arizona
The same country, on camera.
iv · the roads
Where the roads went.
A few of the places the work and the family took us — measured the same way the desert was: by going, and by looking.
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New Zealand
The Coromandel coast
Tree ferns and turquoise coves — green hills that fall straight into the sea.
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Big Bend
The Chisos · West Texas
Basin Junction — the far side of the desert of the real.
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Saguaro country
Tucson Mountain District · Arizona
The scan on the surface of this page came from the bajada below Wasson Peak — walked, held still, and measured. Every point is a measurement.
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Home country
The Ozarks · Springfield, Missouri
Home. K0TLR. The workshop and the bench and the family — the anchor everything else is measured from. Wilson’s Creek is fifteen minutes down the road; the shop antenna is up the driveway. Everything ships from here.
Wilson’s Creek battlefield · measured, and on the scan wall above.
v · writing
Essays & field notes.
Short pieces, mostly at the seam of tools and self-reliance. Long pieces when a book isn’t ready yet.
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The Problem with Exact
Chapter one of Near Enough. Free — the rest is yours for what it’s worth to you.
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The huckleberry problem
Doc Holliday says “I’m your huckleberry” twice in Tombstone, and both times he is agreeing to do the thing nobody else wants to. That’s the whole idea. A huckleberry job is not a well-scoped job. It is the one that has already been scoped, priced, staffed, kicked off, and killed — twice — and it still needs to work.
The huckleberry doesn’t come in with a slide deck. He comes in with the tools he actually owns and a willingness to be there until it’s done. That’s the deal. If you’ve got that kind of problem, you already know it.
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Notes from saguaro country
A saguaro doesn’t care how the phone is oriented. You walk around it in the January sun, holding an iPhone at whatever awkward angle keeps the sun off the lens, and when Scaniverse is done the file it hands you is 689,962 Gaussian ellipsoids — a measurement of a real plant in real light, in real space, at 32.26°N, 111.17°W.
The point of the splat on the surface of this site is that it is measured. Nothing here is generated. When the desert shows up on the screen, that is the desert. When the cactus casts a shadow, the shadow was there. This matters to me. It ought to matter more than it does to the rest of the software world.
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Similarity is distance
Most of the interesting problems I get called for don’t need another database. They need a way to ask “how much like this is that?” without pretending the answer is a lookup. Hyperdimensional computing gives you the honest version of that question: project everything into a ten-thousand-dimensional space, and let similarity be distance. Bind, bundle, permute — three operators, one algebra, thirty years of proofs behind it.
When you build that way, the runtime shrinks. The cloud bill shrinks. The edge device becomes plausible. The whole shape of what a program can do on the machine you already own gets larger. That is the whole point of the work.
vi · build with me
Dictate a spec.
Get a formalized plan and a start link.
I build things that other people say can’t be built, won’t work, or aren’t worth the trouble. Then they work. Then they’re worth the trouble.
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Dictate.
Say the problem plainly — voice, sketch, or a page of notes. We’ll shape it in one call.
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Formalize.
You get back a spec — assumptions surfaced, scope drawn, constraints named. It’s yours whether or not we build together.
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Start.
Approve the spec and we begin — usually inside a week, always with a start link and a landing zone you own.
If your problem needs a consultant with a deck and a roadmap, I’m not your huckleberry. If it needs someone who will actually build the thing, we should talk.
Calls are trauma-informed. Bring the messy version — we’ll clean it up together.
vii · say hello
Come by.
Email is fine, letters are better, and if it’s the huckleberry work, a call cuts the distance in half.
Write
tom@tomrankin.net — short notes and long letters both welcome.
Talk
Book a call — twenty minutes, no obligation.