Personal | Jesse Becker

The Through-Line

Different subjects, similar instincts

I am based in Ashland, Kentucky. Away from work and longer-running creative projects, I am usually playing volleyball, hiking, or corralling our two dogs and two cats.

Outside of work, I am usually drawn to projects that combine creativity, structure, and systems thinking. Whether I am writing science fiction, organizing research, testing personal technology tools, or building this website, I tend to approach things the same way: figure out how it actually works, find where it breaks down, and make something cleaner out of it.

This page is less a list of hobbies than a glimpse into how I think. I like projects with internal logic, and I like the process of getting there - finding the seams, testing the edges, making it hold.

Two dogs working together to carry the same stick in a yard — Two members of the project management team problem-solving.

01

Photography & Travel

Amateur photographer, enthusiastic traveler

I got into photography mostly by accident — brought a camera on a trip and ended up genuinely hooked. Travel is still the best excuse to keep at it. It has also made me more deliberate about how I frame and present things generally, which turns out to be useful well beyond the hobby.

A black Labrador walking through a field, backlit by the low golden sun — Chasing the last light of the day.

Looking up at the coffered stone ceiling of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris — Looking up inside the Arc de Triomphe, Paris.

Black and white photograph of cloud rolling over a forested mountain ridgeline — Cloud rolling over the ridgeline, in black and white.

The Champs-Elysees seen from above, looking down the tree-lined avenue in Paris — The Champs-Élysées from above, Paris.

Black and white interior of a horse stable with raking light through the doorways — Morning light through the stable.

Two pink flamingos with their necks curved toward each other — Two flamingos.

Two tiny hikers silhouetted at the summit of a rocky mountain ridge against a cloudy sky — Summit, Norway.

Tower Bridge in London seen from across the Thames on a sunny day — Tower Bridge, London.

A seagull mid-flight against a pale blue sky, wings fully extended — Caught mid-glide.

02

Heliofall

A long-form military science fiction project built around grounded constraints

Active Project HF Hard-ish Military Science Fiction

Long-Form Fiction

Scale has to be earned

Heliofall is a military science fiction epic built around grounded technology, institutional pressure, political scale, and character-driven conflict. The story begins with people operating inside military and organizational systems, then widens toward larger consequences over time.

Command structures, logistics, communications, intelligence failures, political incentives, and technological limits all matter. I am interested in worlds where decisions have costs, institutions have weight, and characters must navigate systems larger than themselves.

Military Science Fiction Institutional Pressure Grounded Technology Character-Driven Conflict

A

Institutions & Consequences

Exploring duty, loyalty, institutional decay, strategic failure, cultural identity, and the gap between official narratives and lived experience.

B

Worldbuilding Systems

Maintaining factions, timelines, terminology, military structures, political relationships, technology rules, and character arcs as the setting grows.

C

Reference Without Clutter

Keeping the fictional universe coherent without documenting for its own sake. The notes should support the writing, not become the writing.

03

Reading & Ideas

Science fiction with weight behind it, plus systems thinking and technology's effect on society

SF

Military & Hard-ish Science Fiction

I am drawn to stories shaped by war, politics, logistics, technology, and the long-term consequences of change. Formative and current touchstones include The Falcon Banner, Honor Harrington, The Lost Fleet, Frontlines, Black Fleet Saga, Dread Empire's Fall, Vatta's War, The Forever War, Old Man's War, and Expeditionary Force.

+

Wider Horizons

I also return to Iain M. Banks, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ted Chiang, Isaac Asimov, and Becky Chambers for questions of scale, ethics, progress, and social structure.

SYS

Systems Thinking

Books such as Thinking in Systems and The Fifth Discipline connect to my interest in incentives, feedback loops, information flow, and hidden constraints.

WHY

The Common Thread

Spaceships are cool. The deeper draw is fiction that takes its world seriously: how power works, how systems fail, and how people adapt when technology changes the rules.

04

Personal Technology

Small systems and experiments that keep me close to the tools themselves

WEB

This Website

I wanted a portfolio I fully controlled, so I built a static HTML and CSS site, deployed it through GitHub and Cloudflare Pages, and used it to document selected L&D, knowledge management, and training-systems work.

AI

AI-Assisted Workflows

Hands-on with agentic coding and AI writing tools - Claude Code, Codex, and GitHub Desktop among them - as a practical support layer for coding, documentation, and knowledge work. The aim is to accelerate drafts and comparisons while keeping human review and source quality central.

PKM

Personal Knowledge Management

Keeping notes and reference systems for writing, research, technology experiments, and long-term planning. The goal is useful information that stays findable without constant maintenance.

UI

Design Experiments

Exploring layout, spacing, typography, gradients, responsive behavior, and the small interaction details that make a digital experience feel intentional rather than merely functional.

05

Practical Projects

The quieter satisfaction of making something work better than it did yesterday

Turning vague friction into a usable system

I also like practical projects: improving a workflow, organizing a space, testing a tool, or finding a more reliable way to handle a recurring problem. It is not glamorous, but I enjoy figuring out what is actually broken and making it less so.

Beyond the Desk