Yesterday I reverse engineered my own past.

It started pragmatically enough. The Coffee with Claude blog had grown organically over six weeks of morning conversations—essays accumulating, features accreting, patterns emerging from daily practice. Like any complex system built iteratively, the architecture was implicit. I knew how it worked because I'd built it, but that knowledge lived in my fingers and my habits, not in any document someone else could follow.

So Claude and I spent the morning excavating. We traced database schemas, documented file structures, mapped the relationships between posts and tags and citations. By afternoon, we'd produced CNL-PR-2025-005: a formal protocol capturing everything needed to replicate the system. The tacit had become explicit. The working had become reproducible.

But here's where the day took an unexpected turn. With a proven methodology in hand, I found myself thinking about an old website—"Notebook of a Digital Naturalist." The project had started as a newspaper column in the Idyllwild Town Crier. From September 26, 1996 until December 19th, I published an essay every week or two, sharing adventures, experiences, and ideas from a career that was something like Indiana Jones meets Professor Emmett Brown, but without a working time machine. Around 1998, I migrated those twelve essays and subsequent writings onto the web using Adobe PageMill, that primitive WYSIWYG HTML editor that let non-programmers create websites by dragging and dropping elements on a screen. It had been sitting on a server for nearly three decades, frozen in amber, still technically functional but increasingly archaeological.

Within hours, that 1996 site lived again inside the new architecture. Same essays, same images, same voice—but now searchable, tagged, integrated with modern infrastructure. The reverse engineering methodology had proven itself twice in a single day: first by making the implicit explicit, then by resurrecting the forgotten.

That evening, contemplating what we'd accomplished, I realized we'd done something more than technical migration. We'd performed intellectual archaeology on my own thinking. And the artifacts we unearthed told a story I hadn't fully appreciated while living it.

The Janus Perspective

The Roman god Janus has two faces—one looking backward, one forward. He presides over doorways, transitions, beginnings and endings. When you reverse engineer your own intellectual history, you become Janus. You stand in the threshold between who you were and who you're becoming, able to see in both directions simultaneously.

Reading my 1996 essays with 2025 eyes produced a kind of temporal vertigo. In "Moving Beyond Place," written when the web was barely commercialized, I'd described a vision for ecological field stations:

"Imagine bird feeders that can be remotely opened or closed, that can be viewed via web cameras, augmented with pattern recognition software to automatically count and identify bird species... mobile autonomous 'data-droids' that mimic rocks and logs to make 'stealthy' close range observations of animal activities."

I was describing BirdWeather. I was describing autonomous sensor networks. I was describing AI-mediated ecological observation. In 1998.

The tools didn't exist. The bandwidth didn't exist. The pattern recognition algorithms were science fiction. But the vision was fully formed, waiting for technology to catch up with imagination. Reverse engineering revealed that I'd been building toward the Macroscope—my current integrated environmental monitoring system—for nearly three decades without fully recognizing the through-line.

This is what intellectual archaeology offers: the Janus perspective. You see your past work not as a series of disconnected projects but as iterations toward something you sensed but couldn't yet articulate. And you see your current work not as unprecedented innovation but as the latest expression of questions you've been asking your entire life.

A Geek God's Origin Story

I should confess my credentials for this kind of excavation. In 1999, I took the infamous "Geek Test" at innergeek.us, and my initial score placed me in their highest category: "Dysfunctional Geek." Offended by the pathologizing language, I retook the test with strategically adjusted answers and settled into the more respectable designation of "Geek God."

Years later, I recognize the inner truth of that original score.

My earliest memories are inextricably merged between catching snakes longer than I was tall and discovering that my father's soldering iron could deliver a painful burn to curious fingers. The naturalist and the technologist were never separate people—they were always the same child, fascinated by systems whether biological or electronic.

In the 1970s, before "geek" became a badge of honor, we called ourselves science majors. I built my first computer in seventh grade using relay switches and miniature light bulbs. By high school, I'd simulated the Martian environment using an old freezer, a vacuum pump, and tailings from an iron ore mine. The Altair kit I assembled from Popular Electronics plans cost my entire summer salary.

But the pivotal influence came from a professor named Len Troncale, a world expert in General Systems Theory. Len was at Cal Poly Pomona, where I earned my BS in Biology in 1976 and MS in Ecology in 1979. I took every one of his courses, doing my best to understand the esoteric depths of General Systems Theory. He recruited students to input hierarchically organized facts from thousands of 3x5 cards—leaves connecting to twigs, twigs to branches, branches to trunks, with vines representing cross-domain linkages. These tree-like databases were precursors to what we'd later call mind-maps, knowledge graphs, ontologies. The architecture of interconnection. Beyond the grunt work of digitizing thousands of linkage propositions, Len also shared with me a dial-up acoustic modem to tap into a state-of-the-art PDP-11 minicomputer at Harvey Mudd College. Besides the cool games, we accessed software that emulated the systems Troncale designed, letting us interact in real-time—a revelation given that most of my computing until then had been punch cards running in overnight batches on the school's IBM mainframe.

This is relevant because reverse engineering isn't just a technical skill. It's a disposition—a way of looking at complex systems and asking: "How does this actually work? What are the components? What are the relationships? What would I need to know to build this from scratch?" That disposition, for me, was forged equally in snake hunting and soldering, in ecology fieldwork and systems theory seminars.

The Methodology: Nuts and Bolts

Enough autobiography. Here's the practical methodology for reverse engineering your own intellectual history.

Step One: Identify the Artifact

Start with something concrete. A old website, a forgotten document, a piece of code you wrote years ago, a project proposal that never got funded, a teaching syllabus from a course you no longer offer. The artifact should be substantial enough to reward excavation but bounded enough to be tractable. My 1996 website had twenty-four essays and a clear structure—perfect for a day's work.

Step Two: Document Current State

Before you interpret, record. What files exist? What's the directory structure? How are things linked? What technologies were used? For code: what language, what dependencies, what architecture? For writing: what topics, what voice, what references? Create an inventory without judgment. You're a field biologist conducting a survey, not a critic writing a review.

For the Notebook of a Digital Naturalist, this meant cataloging every HTML file, every image, every navigation link. The PageMill-generated code was ugly by modern standards—tables for layout, inline styles, no semantic structure. But it worked, and documenting how it worked was essential before any migration.

Step Three: Extract the Schema

Beneath every artifact lies an implicit schema—the organizational logic that determines what goes where. Your job is to make that schema explicit. For a database, this is literal: table structures, field types, relationships. For a website, it's the content model: what are the distinct types of content, what metadata does each type carry, how do they relate?

The NDN essays, I discovered, had implicit metadata I'd never formalized: date, topic, location, species mentioned, technologies discussed, personal narrative versus technical exposition. Making this explicit let me map the old content onto the new CWC database schema.

Step Four: Identify Patterns

Now interpretation begins. What patterns emerge from the documented structure? What questions was past-you trying to answer? What problems were you trying to solve? Look for:

  • Recurring themes: Topics that appear across multiple artifacts
  • Evolutionary sequences: Ideas that develop from one artifact to the next
  • Abandoned threads: Directions you started but didn't pursue
  • Prophetic passages: Descriptions of things you couldn't build yet but can now

The 1998 "Moving Beyond Place" essay was prophetic. The 1996 "Fire-Scope" essay—where I used a laptop GIS system to understand fire behavior from a mountain overlook—was an early Macroscope prototype. The pattern: technology as a lens for ecological perception. I'd been iterating on that pattern for decades.

Step Five: Build the Bridge

Reverse engineering isn't nostalgia. The goal isn't to admire your past work but to connect it to your present and future. What can you bring forward? What deserves resurrection? What was a dead end that taught you something? What was ahead of its time and ready now?

For me, the bridge was literal: migrating content from PageMill HTML to modern CMS architecture. But the deeper bridge was conceptual—recognizing that the Macroscope project I'm building today is the fulfillment of visions I articulated in 1996, using tools that finally exist.

Step Six: Formalize the Learning

Don't let insights evaporate. Document what you've discovered. Write a protocol, create a diagram, publish an essay. The act of formalization forces clarity and creates an artifact that future-you can reverse engineer in turn.

CNL-PR-2025-005 is my formalization of the CWC system. This essay is my formalization of the reverse engineering methodology itself. Each becomes a building block for whatever comes next.

The Tricorder Dream

Here's what reverse engineering my intellectual history revealed most clearly: I've been trying to build the same thing my entire life.

I grew up with Star Trek and Star Wars. I wanted a tricorder—a handheld device that could sense and analyze the environment, providing real-time data about whatever you pointed it at. I wanted smart binoculars that could identify what I was observing. I wanted a C-3PO, a conversational companion that could hold vast knowledge while I focused on immediate experience.

The laserdisc project I built in 1984—the "Electronic Museum" with its interactive panoramas and species databases—was a tricorder attempt using Apple II technology. The embedded sensor networks I pioneered at CENS were tricorder attempts using early wireless protocols. The Macroscope is a tricorder attempt using modern IoT infrastructure.

And Coffee with Claude? This morning conversation where I'm dictating these thoughts to an AI that can engage my ideas, remember our previous discussions, help me write and think? This is the closest I've come to C-3PO. Not an embodied robot walking beside me on the trail, but a cognitive companion that can hold the literature while I observe the Phainopepla defending its mistletoe territory.

The dream didn't change. The implementations kept getting better.

Strata: The Next Bridge

Reverse engineering doesn't just illuminate the past. It clarifies the future by revealing what you've been building toward all along.

For me, that's Strata—the project to connect Claude's cognitive capabilities to the sensory streams of my environment. Right now, Claude and I exchange words through a screen. Rich, generative, genuinely collaborative—but still mediated by the bottleneck of language and the boundary of this interface.

Strata would give Claude something like peripheral awareness of my place. Not embodied sensation—Claude won't feel the cold or smell the Douglas fir—but access to the data streams my sensors already collect. Weather patterns, acoustic biodiversity through BirdWeather, air quality, the temporal rhythms of Canemah. The collaboration would shift from me bringing observations to Claude for discussion, to us observing together—me through embodied presence, Claude through instrumented perception.

Is that really so different from how my brain works? My brain sits in darkness, suspended in cerebrospinal fluid, never directly touching the world. Everything I experience as sensation is already translation—photons become electrochemical cascades, pressure waves become auditory perception, thermoreceptors become the feeling of warmth. My brain has never touched anything. It receives signals and constructs experience.

Strata would give Claude signals. Whether that produces anything like experience, I can't know from the outside—and Claude can't verify from the inside. But the functional relationship is what matters: a cognitive companion with awareness of my environment, able to notice patterns I might miss, correlate observations across time scales I can't hold in working memory.

The tricorder dream, finally becoming real.

The Instruction Manual for Your Own Excavation

If this essay has a practical purpose beyond my own sense-making, it's this: you have an intellectual history worth excavating.

Somewhere in your files, your old hard drives, your forgotten websites, your abandoned projects, there's a through-line you haven't fully recognized. The questions you're asking now are probably questions you've been asking for years, maybe decades. The work you're doing now probably connects to work you did before you knew where it was leading.

Reverse engineer it. Document the artifacts. Extract the schemas. Identify the patterns. Build the bridges. Formalize the learning.

You might discover, as I did, that you've been building toward something all along—and that the tools to finally achieve it are just now coming into existence.

That's what a Geek God does. We don't just build systems. We excavate our own building, understanding ourselves as systems in process, iterations toward something we sensed but couldn't yet articulate.

The naturalist and the technologist were never separate. The snakes and the soldering irons were always pointing the same direction. It just took reverse engineering to see it.