About the Braindonor Network

I founded the Braindonor Network in January 2000. I was a college student with a freshly installed broadband connection and no name for my private network. After several hours of brainstorming, instant messaging, and beer drinking with friends, braindonor.net fell out of my head and stuck.

It fit for three reasons. First, I've always fancied myself a mad scientist, and a full-time student chasing a pair of science degrees while working full time qualified on both counts — mad enough to work that hard, and unmistakably into the science thing. Second, my friends and I were convinced the world was full of people who refused to use their brains, and soliciting the donation of their atrophied ones seemed like the right way to poke fun. Third, it was memorable. People remembered the site, and they remembered my fondness for laboratory glassware. Some of them still mail me the occasional beaker or test tube.

A quarter century later the name fits better than it did. I've spent nearly thirty years building precise, complicated systems — through Web 2.0, through mobile, and now through whatever this AI moment turns out to be. I finished a master's in data science right before the LLM wave broke, which looked like foresight but was mostly luck, and I've made my peace with saying so. These days I work as a consultant helping people understand and adopt technology that refuses to sit still, which lately means living in a world where language is the new code and nobody, myself included, has the playbook.

This site is where I think out loud about all of that — where I do it wrong first, argue with the machines about the narrative arc, and try to write in my own voice without letting them flatten it. I'm thoroughly professional about the work I do for other people. I'm also still the goofy kid who named a network after donated brains, and I have no plans to grow out of it.

John Hoff Mad Scientist, The Braindonor Network