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Henry Sowell

Vol. I · Est. 2026

A personal field journal

I build small things for people I love.

I’m Henry. Husband, dad, Marine, and technology leader. By day I lead a global team of technologists. By night I run a data center in my basement and ship small things because making them keeps me sharp. This is where all of it lives under one roof: the projects, the opinions, and the things that mean something to me.

The Catalog

Plates I–VIII

Plate Ifield

A Raspberry Pi e-paper frame that discovers birds observed near you and renders them as illustrated field-journal plates. It found a real audience, and its community-built catalog now feeds the gallery on this site.

Inky Bird Frame

Bird field-journal plates for e-ink displays

github.com/veteranbv/inky-bird-frame

Plate IIframework

Card-drawing decks for dinner tables and long drives: warm-up questions, deeper ones, and silly ones for the kids. We played these in our own house before I put them here.

Questions for Connection

A deck of 661 questions for real conversation

henrysowell.com/questions-for-connection

Plate IIIgame

A word game built as a tribute to the puzzles Charity and I play together. Guess the word; the arrows tell you which way each letter sits in the alphabet.

Tworbel

A five-letter word duel with directional hints

tworbel.com

Plate IVgame

Verses and church fathers on an old airport departure board, as a website and a native macOS screensaver. I built it for the quiet flip of the flaps.

Flappy Bible

Scripture on a split-flap display

flappy.bible

Plate Vgame

A falling-block arcade game that runs entirely in your terminal, with Classic NES and modern rule sets. Pure Python, zero dependencies, installable with pip.

Falliant

Terminal block-stacking, classic and modern rules

pip install falliant

Plate VIframework

How I lead and what I ask of the leaders I work with: people first, execution obsessed, and the five levels of initiative adapted for how we work now. Built on lessons from the Marine Corps through two decades of leading technology teams.

Being a Leader Is a Privilege

My leadership philosophy, written down

henrysowell.com/my-leadership-philosophy

Plate VIIframework

The talent grid I have run since 2015, written down: the two questions, the strata, the calibration rules, and a working grid you can place your own team on. Nothing you type leaves your browser.

The Nine Box

A working grid for seeing your team clearly

henrysowell.com/the-nine-box

Plate VIIIjournal

The other side of the basement: a full enterprise stack at home, the AI harness that helps me run it, and the tools and write-ups I share back to the community.

homelab.codes

Field notes and tools from a working homelab

homelab.codes

“Small things, honestly. But they keep me sharp.”

From the About page