About Me

I like to stay mostly anonymous on the internet. I've been doxxed and threatened before (and not by MAGA, but by wacko Billy Strings fans) which was a strange and scary experience. So if you want to get in touch with me, please reach out with a DM at @billy.winning. I'm happy to talk more about myself and welcome questions, criticisms, discussion, and anything in between. I'm a computer engineer, used to work in music (guitar pedals), now I work in baseball tech, and I've always got a bunch of side projects going on. Always open to talking about my ideas and exploring new opportunities.

History

This site grew out of @billy.winning, an Instagram account I started in 2023. I wrote this script that would take a song and a video and estimate the tempo of the audio of both, then replace the video audio with the song and scale the video playback accordingly. Basically I could make it look like people were dancing to Billy Strings. My roommate half jokingly suggested I start an instagram account, and so I did.

I thought I was being super clever when I named it "billy.winning". The joke (I imagine obvious to most of you) is Billy Strings's banjo player is named Billy Failing, hence "Billy Winning". At this point I was on instagram some, but not super plugged into the scene. So, a few months pass, I have a couple hundred followers, I'm starting to make memes, and I realize Billy Failing's account is called @billywinningbanjo. So I probably subconsciously stole the joke, but I was in too deep, and stuck with it. As I've grown people continue to confuse me with Billy Failing which continues to conuse me how people could possible thing Billy Failing runs a meme page. I also do have a pretty clear disclaimer in my bio and rebranded to "The Pickin Frog" to try and help. Alas.

I first started writing blog posts on Medium, sometime in late 2023. At it's one year anniversary I was still riding the Away from the Shire high (to this day, the best weekend of my life) and wanted to tell everyone how cool all the intricate connections to the story they made were. Instagram could only take me so far, so I wrote two articles on Medium, analyses of the first two nights of Away from the Shire and how each song connected to the story. It's incredible what they accomplished with those shows!

I liked writing those articles, and I also had been selling merch on Redbubble for about a year with some success. However, I wanted to run my own shop, so I could do things like drops instead of pay-to-print. Thus in July 2024, thepickinfrog.com was born. I built a Wordpress site, ported my medium posts, and listed a single sticker for sale. I had built websites from scratch before, but I just wanted an easy way to publish blog posts and sell the occasional piece of merch. I started using Wordpress, publishing more blog posts, it was really fun to have a writing outlet and see a few people engage with it.

Then, my life got busy and I stopped writing as much. I realized that Wordpress really sucked, I had no control over anything I was making, and I was paying for hosting services with ridiculous pricing. I took the site down right before my hosting plan renewed for a third year in April of 2026. At this point, I was (am) working a new job at a startup and have much less time to put towards @billy.winning and my projects, but I knew I still wanted to get this site back up and running at some point.

August 2026 rolls around, I've been on a side project coding frenzy, and I decided it was time to finally do it. With the skills I've learned at work over the past few years and the state of agentic development, I was able to get this site back up and running in less than a day of work and for $0 in hosting costs. I also set up a great way to easily locally edit my pages and posts and publish.

So, hopefully I'm back! I want to write about the new Billy album, about Sturgill's newest record, about shows, about politics, about all things. Now that I have control over all my code, I also want to build some kind of data analysis tools for music, but I'm not sure yet what form that will take. I also have a prototype viewer for tracking election fundraising using FEC data, so stay tuned for that!

This website will serve as a home for my various projects that will hopefully interest some of you. But don't worry, I'm going to try to keep the memes up. It's been hard to find the time lately but once Billy is back on tour I won't be able to help myself.

If I ever add the ability to comment be nice to each other.

8/29/26