About
I'm a technologist in San Francisco, and this is where I think out loud. I spent a few decades building things for other people and never quite got around to writing any of it down, so this is me finally doing that, mostly to find out what I actually believe. The monochrome panels, hairlines, and stacked shadows all come from an old business card of mine, which I've recreated at the bottom of the page.
A little more
These days I run Joust, an AI operations and technology strategy consultancy I co-founded in 2022. The work, mostly, is helping organizations think through the technical decisions that don't have clean answers: enterprise architecture, systems integration, where AI actually fits, and the messy places those things collide. A fair amount of it is just being the person in the room willing to ask whether we're even solving the right problem yet.
Before Joust I spent thirty years leading technology teams at agencies, among them Monks, Firewood, Razorfish, and Edelman, shipping enterprise platforms for brands you'll recognize: Google, Meta, Microsoft, Honda, LinkedIn, PayPal, and so many more. I'm proud of that work. Thirty years of it also taught me how much I'd been confidently wrong about along the way, which is a good part of why I finally started writing things down.
The name is the oldest thing here. My full legal name is Ronald Leland Davis III, which is frankly more name than any one person needs, so my father boiled it down to RLD3: the initials, plus the "third." I registered rld3.com back in 2001, and nearly twenty-five years later I finally had something to put on it. There's an accidental joke in it, too: RLD3 is also a real piece of hardware, Reduced Latency DRAM 3, a kind of memory chip. My father certainly didn't know that. But of all the things a childhood nickname could secretly stand for, low-latency memory is a suspiciously fitting one, given what I ended up doing for a living.
Off the clock I'm a father, a lifelong Calvin & Hobbes fan, and the reason this site has a playable asteroids game hidden in it. The business card down at the bottom still lists a role and a city I left behind years ago. I kept it exactly as it was, because I like the reminder of where all of this started.
The blog is where the rest goes: notes on technology, the craft of building, and a fair amount of everything else. None of it is meant to be the last word, mine least of all. And if a page here ever goes missing, stick around: the wreckage is playable.
The whole site is built on this card
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