I’m Ron Helwig: a software developer, writer, and teacher based in New Hampshire.
This site is a small public home for essays, practical notes, recipes, and older archive pieces I still want online. It is also the first real-world content set for Decent Site — a project aimed at durable personal publishing without depending on a conventional hosting stack.
What you’ll find here
- Writing — longer notes on mail, politics, culture, and technology
- Recipes — household favorites kept as plain pages (more later)
- Resume — a condensed software background (historical; not a job search page)
Background in brief
I grew up in Minnesota, earned a computer science degree, and spent years as a consultant and programmer across web, database, and desktop work. In 2000 I ran for U.S. House in Minnesota’s 2nd District as a Libertarian. I moved to New Hampshire with the Free State Project in 2005 and have lived in several NH towns since.
Along the way I’ve written about sound money and community projects (including work around Shire Silver that later showed up in public NPR Planet Money coverage), taught with Dungeons & Dragons and other RPGs, and kept experimenting with practical tech — from Drupal-era client sites to Minecraft mods and local tools.
Why this site exists
I want a personal site that stays simple: Markdown in, HTML out, no visitor tracking, and a publishing path that can eventually live on decentralized storage with Dash metadata. This version is intentionally lean — a few solid pages and articles rather than a full historical dump.
If something here is outdated or missing context, treat it as a working public draft. I’m rebuilding the useful parts of an older site, not freezing every past page in amber.