root@hashking:~$ cat about.md
the operator
not a resume. a kid who started writing code at 12, a teenager who got into breaking it, a decade inside colorado cannabis — and now a registered caregiver operation and a software practice, run by the same person.
i started writing code at 12. at 13 i won my first competition — the prize was an iPad, which at the time felt like the future showing up early. before i turned 15 i'd worked with several startups, and one of them went on to become a billion-dollar company. that's where i learned that shipping beats planning, and that small teams can do unreasonable things.
in my late teens the interest turned toward how things break. penetration testing and all its intricacies, cryptography, security and opsec as a way of thinking rather than a checklist. i was in a computer science and political science program — the systems and the people who govern them, which turned out to be good preparation for a heavily regulated plant.
then came the business side. i worked as an assistant to several wealthy business owners and ended up running multiple businesses for other people — especially in the alt-cannabinoid space when it boomed, from the end of 2019 into 2022. i left it disillusioned: the chemicals, the risks nobody was disclosing, and the greed of people who mostly wanted to deal weed, but legally.
what came after was research — and relationships with the solventless people who'd been doing it right the whole time. that became my own practice: a registered cultivating caregiver operation, two light-dep greenhouse bays of big photoperiod plants on JADAM natural inputs, and a fresh-frozen wash-freeze-dry-press line turning every harvest into ice water hash and live rosin for the five registered patients a caregiver is allowed. no solvents, no conversions, nothing added.
it's run the way a plant-count-capped grow has to be. the cultivation is registered with the MED with each patient's registry number and extended plant count on file, it sits on non-residential land, enclosed and locked, and every plant, rooted cutting, and tissue culture is tagged to a patient and counted against the 99 — even the ones the statute is vague about. the library lives in tissue culture so the count goes to benches that actually produce, and patients pay cost, because a caregiver can't legally charge more than that. their certifications cover more than the standard 8g a day of concentrate, the same way their extended plant counts are written.
code never left. it manages properties, runs websites, keeps the plant log honest, and at night it's mostly Discord-adjacent — GameTime, a handful of PreMiD presences, a Vencord plugin — plus self-hosted infra and some OSINT tooling built on top of bellingcat's open-source tools. all of it lives in the same terminal.
a registered cultivating caregiver in colorado — two staggered light-dep greenhouse bays of big photoperiod plants on JADAM natural inputs, run right up against the 99-plant cap.
ice water hash and live rosin from what's harvested on site — fresh-frozen only, nothing added but ice, water, heat, and pressure. all of it goes to registered patients.
the library lives in tissue culture instead of a room full of mothers — only the active cross's parents are live, which keeps the plant count on benches that actually produce.
penetration testing since my late teens, cryptography for longer. the habit of asking how something breaks before trusting it carries into everything else.
GameTime, PreMiD presences, a Vencord plugin. mostly TypeScript, mostly at night.
property management tooling, websites for people who needed them, and the scripts that keep a compliant grow's plant log honest.
colorado, phase by phase
a decade watching it from the inside
i've been a consumer since 2013 — right before recreational sales opened — which means i've watched every era of colorado's market arrive, peak, and get corrected. every phase fixed something real and broke something else. here's the honest version of each.
2009–2013
the medical boom
medical had been legal since Amendment 20 in 2000, but it was the 2009 Ogden memo — the feds signaling they'd leave compliant state programs alone — that turned it into storefronts on every other block. HB10-1284 followed in 2010 and built the first regulated medical-center system.
what got better
- +real access for patients for the first time, not just a doctor's note and a guy
- +a generation of craft growers learning in the open
- +jarred flower you could actually look at before buying
what got worse
- −no mandatory potency or contaminant testing — the label was whatever someone wrote on it
- −homemade edibles dosed by vibes
- −a caregiver system with room for hundreds of plants per caregiver, which is exactly how it got abused before the legislature capped it at 99
2013 is where i came in, at 16 — the very tail of this era, with Amendment 64 already passed and retail a few months out.
2014–2016
retail opens
Amendment 64 passed in November 2012 and recreational sales started January 1, 2014. shatter and wax — butane hash oil — became the headline product almost overnight, and edibles went from bake-sale to commercial.
what got better
- +required lab testing, packaging, and tracking — the first time the label meant something
- +prices falling and stigma falling faster
- +concentrates going mainstream, which is what eventually pulled people toward extraction as a craft
what got worse
- −edible overconsumption became the national story — the 10mg-per-serving cap arrived in February 2015, and the stamped universal THC symbol on every serving in October 2016
- −2015's pesticide holds and recalls showed how little anyone had been checking what was sprayed
- −early BHO quality all over the map, with residual solvent a real question
2016–2019
distillate, carts, and live resin
vape carts took over the counter. distillate — cannabinoids stripped of everything else, then re-flavored — made it cheap to fill them. at the other end, live resin (butane extraction of fresh-frozen material) proved that the terpenes lost in drying were worth saving, and diamonds and sauce followed.
what got better
- +live resin made 'fresh frozen' a thing people asked for by name
- +portable, discreet, consistent dosing for people who needed it
- +the market started rewarding flavor instead of just THC percentage
what got worse
- −distillate with botanical terpenes flattened every strain into the same candy
- −thinning agents in carts — when the 2019 lung-injury outbreak hit, mostly traced to vitamin E acetate in illicit carts, the MED had already banned it, along with PEG and MCT, in inhalable products (announced November 5, effective January 1, 2020)
- −a cart hides everything — color, texture, what's actually in it
2019–2022
the alt-cannabinoid gold rush
the 2018 Farm Bill legalized hemp, a CBD glut followed, and somebody figured out that CBD could be chemically converted into delta-8 THC. then delta-10, HHC, THC-O, THCP — a new molecule every few months, sold anywhere a CBD shop could be.
what got better
- +access in places that still had none
- +a lifeline for hemp farmers after the CBD price crash
- +it forced the question of what 'intoxicating' should legally mean
what got worse
- −most of it was synthesis, not extraction — acids, solvents, metal catalysts, and reaction byproducts almost nobody was testing for
- −labs that couldn't separate isomers, so the label was a best guess
- −acetate esters like THC-O raising the same vaping concerns that got vitamin E acetate banned
- −an industry full of people who wanted to deal weed but legally, and priced like it
this was my era on the business side — running operations for other people in this space from late 2019 into 2022. i left disillusioned: by the chemistry, by the risk being pushed onto customers, and by how much of it was greed dressed up as a loophole. Colorado's health department said as much in May 2021 (chemically converted cannabinoids aren't compliant hemp products), and SB23-271 in 2023 made intoxicating products marijuana-only.
2020–now
solventless, and the correction
ice water hash and live rosin came back around as the top shelf: fresh-frozen plants, washed in ice water, dried, and pressed with heat — nothing added, nothing to purge. hash got graded by micron and melt again, the way it used to be.
what got better
- +the cleanest thing on the shelf, with nothing between the plant and the product
- +genetics matter again — how a strain washes is now part of how it's bred and selected
- +cold cure, full-melt grading, and real hash culture replacing the THC-percentage arms race
what got worse
- −expensive and genetics-dependent — a bad washer is a bad washer, no matter how it looks
- −a wholesale price collapse after 2021 that squeezed exactly the small growers who make the good stuff
- −HB21-1317 cutting the medical concentrate daily limit from 40g to 8g in 2022 — defensible on paper, rough on the patients who genuinely needed more
- −inflated potency numbers and lab shopping still hanging around
this is where i landed — years of research and time spent with solventless people who'd been doing it right the whole time, until it was my own practice. that's what the greenhouse and the press on /now are.
the through-line, if there is one: every shortcut the market took eventually got corrected, and the stuff that lasted was the stuff that didn't need one. that's why the operation looks the way it does — natural inputs, fresh-frozen and solventless, genetics picked for how they wash, and a plant log that could survive an audit. it's the same instinct as the security work: assume someone's going to check, and build it so they find nothing.
the full kit lives on /uses.