Todd LeBaron — Navy veteran, Air Force AI engineer, STRATCOM wargamer, global consultant, company founder, and AI platform architect.
Started on PDP-11s and Apple IIes in the early ’80s. Flew anti-submarine warfare missions in the Pacific. Ran DARPA AI research at Rome Labs with teams from MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Stanford. Directed nuclear deterrence wargaming systems at STRATCOM on 30-year-old mainframes.
Left the military for the private sector — Andersen Consulting, then London to lead EMEA services at Callidus. Came back to Austin and founded OpenSymmetry, grew it to a $30M professional services firm across 17 industries.
Now in Scottsdale building AI Code Rally — an enterprise governance platform for AI-assisted development. Everything from the military discipline to the AI research to the consulting to the company-building feeds into what we’re creating.
The machines changed. The mission didn’t.
Every machine I’ve touched shaped how I think about building systems.
The big iron era. PDP-11 minicomputers, IBM mainframes, green phosphor terminals, JCL job cards. Computing meant waiting in line at the campus lab to submit your deck. The machines taught patience and precision — every byte mattered.
My first personal computer. Green phosphor CRT. Applesoft BASIC. That ] prompt. I wrote my first programs on this machine — GOTO loops and PEEK/POKE into memory. The magic of making a machine do what you tell it.
Genera OS at Rome Labs during the DARPA AI days. The most exotic machine I ever touched. Purpose-built for artificial intelligence research. The Symbolics 3600 could run, debug, and hot-patch Lisp code at a level modern IDEs still haven’t matched.
ANSI art, 14.4k modems, US Robotics Sportster. The sound of carrier negotiation was the sound of connection. Door games, message boards, file areas. This site’s default theme is a love letter to that era.
Rounded pushpins, distinctive scrollbars, the olvwm window manager. Sun workstations were where real engineering happened. The Unix workstation era — before everything became a PC.
The purple-teal Indigo Magic desktop. The coolest workstation ever made. SGI machines rendered Jurassic Park and Toy Story. IRIX was Unix with style — the 4Dwm window manager, the toolchest, that startup chime. This site has an IRIX theme too.
Steve Jobs’ other computer company. Dark gray panels, vertical title bars, the Dock, Interface Builder. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser on a NeXT cube. The DNA of macOS started here. This site has a NeXTSTEP theme as well.
Yellow tab bars. True preemptive multitasking on commodity hardware. Jean-Louis Gassée’s masterpiece that almost became the next Mac OS. Ahead of its time. Dead before its time.
PDP-11 to AI Code Rally. Every era built on the last. The tools changed — the discipline didn’t.
Full 7-round, 224-pick NFL draft simulator. Pick your team and play GM, or watch 32 CPU teams draft using AI-weighted decision logic. Features real 2026 prospect data, team needs analysis, draft grading, a prediction/betting market with stock ticker, and shareable draft results. Built with Next.js, React, and Tailwind CSS.
Enterprise governance platform for AI-assisted development. Policy enforcement, usage metering, audit trails, and multi-tenant governance. 22 Go microservices, gRPC + NATS event bus, Next.js frontend, Neon PostgreSQL.
Executive-in-Residence consultancy. Advisory services for enterprise clients navigating AI adoption, sales performance management, and digital transformation.
Built from zero to a $30M professional services firm — the largest independent SPM consultancy in the world. 17 industries. Global delivery across North America, EMEA, and APAC.
Go-to-market strategy advisor to CEO. Helped raise a $38M Series A round. POS and inventory platform for craft cocktail bars.
Strategic Wargaming Systems — USSTRATCOM, Offutt AFB. Directed the operation and replacement of a 30-year-old mainframe-based nuclear deterrence wargaming platform. The real WOPR.
DARPA AI R&D — Rome Labs. Managed a $25M AI research portfolio with teams from MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Stanford. Lisp Machines, expert systems, military planning AI.
P-3 Orion ASW — Anti-submarine warfare operations across the Pacific. Rated flight crew.
Founder · AI Evangelist · Veteran
Scottsdale, AZ · LinkedIn →
Captain — Director, Strategic Wargaming Systems USAF, USSTRATCOM · Offutt AFB, Omaha NE Managed the operation and replacement of a 30-year-old mainframe-based Strategic Wargaming System for STRATCOM’s nuclear deterrence platform.
1st Lieutenant — Artificial Intelligence Engineer USAF, Rome Labs · Rome NY Managed a $25M DARPA AI R&D effort across Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and Stanford. Lisp Machines, expert systems, military planning AI.
Petty Officer 2nd Class — Aviation ASW Operator USNR · NAS Point Mugu, Oxnard CA Rated flight crew performing Anti-Surface Warfare and ship interdiction missions on P-3 Orion aircraft across the Pacific.
Founder & Managing Partner — ŒXITS, LLC · Scottsdale, AZ Executive-in-Residence consultancy. Advisory services for KPMG, Accenture, BHG, and technology startups.
Founder — AI Code Rally · Scottsdale, AZ Enterprise AI governance platform. Policy enforcement, audit trails, multi-tenant governance for AI-assisted development.
Chief Development Officer — Real Good Spirits Go-to-market strategy advisor to CEO. Raised $38M Series A round.
Founder & CEO — OpenSymmetry Inc · Austin, TX Built a $30M professional services firm from zero. Global consulting engagements across 17 industries.
Head of Services, EMEA — Callidus · London, UK Multiple technical leadership roles at an early-stage startup in the nascent SPM space.
Senior Solution Architect — Andersen Consulting · Denver, CO Architecture and consulting for Fortune 500 clients.
Director of Engineering, EMEA — Clear with Computers · Minneapolis, MN Built the EMEA software development organization from the ground up.
Bachelor of Science — Physical & Computer Science Northern Arizona University · Flagstaff, AZ
Scottsdale, Arizona
Open to conversations about AI governance, enterprise platform architecture, sales performance management consulting, and advisory engagements.
Best way to reach me is through LinkedIn.
If you grew up around computers in the 1990s, you probably remember the moment you first saw an SGI workstation. For me, it was an Indigo2 running IRIX 6.5 in a university lab. The machine was purple. The desktop had this gradient sky, floating windows with metallic titlebars, and a little running man animation in the corner. It felt like the future.
Silicon Graphics made the machines that rendered Jurassic Park, Toy Story, and Terminator 2. They built hardware for NASA and the NSA. The IRIX operating system and its “Indigo Magic” desktop environment were the visual identity of an era when workstations were serious tools for serious work — and they looked incredible while doing it.
In 2026, I decided to recreate that experience in a browser. Not a screenshot gallery or a CSS mockup, but a functioning desktop environment you can interact with: draggable windows, a working file manager, color scheme switching, a boot sequence, sound effects, and an interactive console. The whole thing.
The site is built with Astro 6, which ships zero JavaScript by default. Every page is static HTML and CSS unless I explicitly opt into client-side scripts. That constraint turned out to be perfect — IRIX’s Indigo Magic desktop was all about carefully composed static UI elements with minimal animation.
CSS custom properties drive the color scheme system. Seven themes (Indigo, Desert, Ocean, Midnight, Rosewood, Slate) are hot-swappable by changing a dozen CSS variables. The selected scheme persists via a cookie, and an inline <script> in the <head> applies it before first paint to prevent any flash.
SVG handles all the icons. Every desktop icon — the person, the resume document, the CRT monitor, the mailbox — is hand-crafted SVG with gradient fills and metallic highlights. I use unique gradient IDs namespaced per icon set to avoid SVG gradient collisions when multiple icons appear on the same page.
Web Audio API provides the sound pack: boot chime, window open/close, icon select, menu click, and shutdown. Audio context initializes lazily on first user interaction to satisfy browser autoplay policies.
The heart of the site is wm.ts — a ~280-line window manager that handles everything IRIX’s 4Dwm did:
bringToFront() increments a global counter. Click a window, it comes to top. Simple but effective.mousedown on a titlebar starts drag tracking. mousedown on the bottom-right resize handle starts resize tracking. Both use document-level mousemove/mouseup listeners so you can drag outside the window bounds.switchDesk() toggles visibility.The splash screen effect — where the window title fades in over a purple gradient before revealing content — uses a CSS overlay with opacity transitions. No JavaScript animation frames needed.
export function bringToFront(id: string): void {
const win = windows.get(id);
if (!win) return;
win.zIndex = ++topZ;
activeWindowId = id;
const el = getWindowEl(id);
if (el) el.style.zIndex = String(win.zIndex);
}The boot sequence has three modes: full PROM simulation (scrolling text → logo → progress bar → desktop fade-in), abbreviated (logo + short progress), and instant skip for returning visitors. During the full boot, a screensaver with a floating SGI cube drifts across a starfield — the same screensaver that returns after 90 seconds of inactivity.
The interactive console is a real shell emulator. You can ls, cd, cat, pwd, and echo. neofetch shows a fake SGI system spec. fortune gives you a random tech quote. cowsay works. And if you type xeyes, a pair of SVG eyeballs appears on your desktop and follows your cursor — click to dismiss. Type doom for a period-accurate IRIX error dialog about insufficient memory.
Color scheme persistence uses a cookie read by an inline <script> before the CSS loads. This prevents the “flash of wrong theme” problem. Background persistence uses the same pattern.
The sound pack includes distinct audio for every interaction: a chime for boot, a soft click for icon selection, a mechanical sound for window open/close. Mute toggle in the toolchest.
CSS-only animations are more powerful than you’d think. The screensaver cube rotation, starfield twinkle, boot fade, window splash — all CSS keyframes and transitions. No requestAnimationFrame, no canvas, no animation libraries. The compositor thread handles everything, which means smooth 60fps even on battery.
SVG gradient ID collisions are real. When you render multiple SVG icons on the same page, gradient IDs like fill="url(#gradient)" need to be unique. I namespace them: cat-folder for catalog icons, fm-folder for file manager icons, ss-cube-top for screensaver. It’s tedious but necessary.
Designing within constraints produces better work. No npm dependencies. No build step beyond Astro. CSS-only animations. Static deployment. These constraints forced creative solutions — and the result loads in under 500ms on a cold start. Sometimes less is genuinely more.
The whole site is open source. If you’re interested in the code, the window manager internals, or how to build metallic SGI gradients in SVG, check out the repo on GitHub.
If you grew up around computers in the 1990s, you probably remember the moment you first saw an SGI workstation. For me, it was an Indigo2 running IRIX 6.5 in a university lab. The machine was purple. The desktop had this gradient sky, floating windows with metallic titlebars, and a little running man animation in the corner. It felt like the future.
Silicon Graphics made the machines that rendered Jurassic Park, Toy Story, and Terminator 2. They built hardware for NASA and the NSA. The IRIX operating system and its “Indigo Magic” desktop environment were the visual identity of an era when workstations were serious tools for serious work — and they looked incredible while doing it.
In 2026, I decided to recreate that experience in a browser. Not a screenshot gallery or a CSS mockup, but a functioning desktop environment you can interact with: draggable windows, a working file manager, color scheme switching, a boot sequence, sound effects, and an interactive console. The whole thing.
The site is built with Astro 6, which ships zero JavaScript by default. Every page is static HTML and CSS unless I explicitly opt into client-side scripts. That constraint turned out to be perfect — IRIX’s Indigo Magic desktop was all about carefully composed static UI elements with minimal animation.
CSS custom properties drive the color scheme system. Seven themes (Indigo, Desert, Ocean, Midnight, Rosewood, Slate) are hot-swappable by changing a dozen CSS variables. The selected scheme persists via a cookie, and an inline <script> in the <head> applies it before first paint to prevent any flash.
SVG handles all the icons. Every desktop icon — the person, the resume document, the CRT monitor, the mailbox — is hand-crafted SVG with gradient fills and metallic highlights. I use unique gradient IDs namespaced per icon set to avoid SVG gradient collisions when multiple icons appear on the same page.
Web Audio API provides the sound pack: boot chime, window open/close, icon select, menu click, and shutdown. Audio context initializes lazily on first user interaction to satisfy browser autoplay policies.
The heart of the site is wm.ts — a ~280-line window manager that handles everything IRIX’s 4Dwm did:
bringToFront() increments a global counter. Click a window, it comes to top. Simple but effective.mousedown on a titlebar starts drag tracking. mousedown on the bottom-right resize handle starts resize tracking. Both use document-level mousemove/mouseup listeners so you can drag outside the window bounds.switchDesk() toggles visibility.The splash screen effect — where the window title fades in over a purple gradient before revealing content — uses a CSS overlay with opacity transitions. No JavaScript animation frames needed.
export function bringToFront(id: string): void {
const win = windows.get(id);
if (!win) return;
win.zIndex = ++topZ;
activeWindowId = id;
const el = getWindowEl(id);
if (el) el.style.zIndex = String(win.zIndex);
}The boot sequence has three modes: full PROM simulation (scrolling text → logo → progress bar → desktop fade-in), abbreviated (logo + short progress), and instant skip for returning visitors. During the full boot, a screensaver with a floating SGI cube drifts across a starfield — the same screensaver that returns after 90 seconds of inactivity.
The interactive console is a real shell emulator. You can ls, cd, cat, pwd, and echo. neofetch shows a fake SGI system spec. fortune gives you a random tech quote. cowsay works. And if you type xeyes, a pair of SVG eyeballs appears on your desktop and follows your cursor — click to dismiss. Type doom for a period-accurate IRIX error dialog about insufficient memory.
Color scheme persistence uses a cookie read by an inline <script> before the CSS loads. This prevents the “flash of wrong theme” problem. Background persistence uses the same pattern.
The sound pack includes distinct audio for every interaction: a chime for boot, a soft click for icon selection, a mechanical sound for window open/close. Mute toggle in the toolchest.
CSS-only animations are more powerful than you’d think. The screensaver cube rotation, starfield twinkle, boot fade, window splash — all CSS keyframes and transitions. No requestAnimationFrame, no canvas, no animation libraries. The compositor thread handles everything, which means smooth 60fps even on battery.
SVG gradient ID collisions are real. When you render multiple SVG icons on the same page, gradient IDs like fill="url(#gradient)" need to be unique. I namespace them: cat-folder for catalog icons, fm-folder for file manager icons, ss-cube-top for screensaver. It’s tedious but necessary.
Designing within constraints produces better work. No npm dependencies. No build step beyond Astro. CSS-only animations. Static deployment. These constraints forced creative solutions — and the result loads in under 500ms on a cold start. Sometimes less is genuinely more.
The whole site is open source. If you’re interested in the code, the window manager internals, or how to build metallic SGI gradients in SVG, check out the repo on GitHub.
Each era recreates the desktop experience of that machine