// OFF THE CLOCK

About me — Judson Dunne

What I do outside of coding:

I just love being outside. Along with coding, I am most definitely (for better or worse) fully addicted to the outdoors, fitness, and pushing my body and mind.

And my development follows in parallel with this love. Locava exists because I kept finding sick places and wanted my friends to experience them as well. RidgeSync exists because I planned one too many trips across four browser tabs and a paper map.

A wide view along a windswept snow ridge

Judson riding through a Vermont covered bridge

Judson on a rocky alpine summit above the clouds

// HOW I GOT HERE

I grew up on a farm in Vermont

HARTLAND, VERMONT
Harlow Brook Farm
I grew up on a small farm in rural Vermont. Along with the occasional TV show, I spent almost all my time outdoors, picking blueberries and building forts.
EVER SINCE I WAS VERY LITTLE
My fascination with building things
Ever since I was very little, I LOVED building things. I was obsessed with Legos, melting down metal in my home made foundry and as I got a bit older, making things in software.
WHEN I TURNED 14
The blacksmith shop
I decided I wanted to build a blacksmith shop. But not just a regular one, a traditional style. So when Covid hit, I spent hours collecting rocks from the property, and learned how to and laid a 6 foot tall, 3 by 8 foot stone wall, with the rest of a blacksmith shop around it.
THE BUSINESS
Misty Mountain Forge
And Misty Mountain Forge was born. I started with the basics, progressively getting better and better, until I was able to make real, useful products. After some outreach support from my mom’s Facebook page, I launched my own website, and orders started flying in. I learned quickly that it’s a lot harder to manage inventory, work management and the things that come along with a real business.
JUNIOR YEAR
CS50, then Dartmouth
After running Misty Mountain Forge for 3 years, I decided to find a new way to build things, still with my hands, but in software. Junior year of high school I took Harvard’s CS50 class that was credited through my high school, and instantly fell in love. So much so, that I convinced a Dartmouth professor to allow me to take his software engineering class at the nearby Dartmouth college while I was still only 17. From that moment onward, I knew building software was what I wanted to do.
EASTON, PA
Lafayette
I moved to Pennsylvania to attend Lafayette college, where I majored in computer science. Here I worked on a few projects, but very soon, I found what I wanted to spend my time doing.
FRESHMAN YEAR
A very rudimentary prototype
I had always been obsessed with cool locations, whether it was a swimming hole, an amazing restaurant, or just a damn good sunset view. But I had always struggled to find and share them with my friends. After putting my new found coding and software skills to use at the start of my freshman year, I built a very rudimentary prototype. I tested it on some friends and it was immediately a hit. Not only did they use it to see what their friends were doing, they used it to genuinely get outside. The fact that I was able to make a meaningful impact on someone’s day through the software I built, was to put it lightly, addicting and deeply fulfilling.
THE NEXT YEAR
Off to the races
And so I was off to the races. I spent the entire next year learning how to code a full production social media app at scale. Through trial and error, online lessons, help from mentors/teachers, I built out full iOS, Android, and web platforms to support the growing user base. In the fall we officially launched a beta user round.
THAT SPRING
The launch
That spring we geared up for our first official launch. We entered in Lafayette’s Big Idea pitch competition and came first place, the day before launch. And when we launched to Lafayette’s campus, it was immediately a hit. We were featured in the newspaper, gained hundreds of users overnight, and eventually grew to over 30% of the entire student body having downloaded our app.
THE NEXT 2 YEARS
Scaling up
Over the course of the next 2 years after, we scaled to thousands of users, raised a seed round, and at peak, I hired and managed a team of 8.
THE BREAK
Taking a break
However, despite me putting every waking hour into Locava for the past 3 years, mainly due to revenue model problems, and scalability, I decided I had to take a break. Locava is still alive and is still slowly but surely organically gaining users, but it was time that I focused on something new.
NOW
RidgeSync, and what’s next
In the time following, I quickly realized how much I can do with the skills and expertise I’ve learned from Locava on a problem and product with far less technical debt. In just a few days, I built out RidgeSync, a backpack trip planning application, which had full iOS, Android and Web platforms. And now, I’m looking to take the software scaling and teamwork skills I learned not just at Locava, but throughout my life, to a team of other people.

TRIATHLON

Racing Ironmans

Swim, bike, run, all day. What drew me in was not the distance. It was that the distance makes cleverness useless. You cannot out-think an Ironman. You either put the hours in over months or the day tells everyone you did not.

It is the closest thing I have found to shipping software: a long unglamorous build, a lot of boring consistency, and one day where all of it is either there or it is not.

Judson bent over catching his breath after a race

Judson riding a road bike through a Vermont covered bridge

HIKING & VERMONT

Hiking places I probably should not…

Winter is the season I plan the year around. Crampons, an axe, and a time I have to turn around by, whether or not I have got to the top.

The rest of the year it is the ordinary version: a trail, a swimming hole, a view worth sitting at until it gets dark. Most of the good ones are not on any list, which is the itch Locava came out of.

Judson on a rime-covered summit holding an ice axe

Judson on a summit in near-whiteout conditions

A climber silhouetted on a snow ridge against the sun

Crampons on, above the cloud line

Everything above treeline turns to rime

MISTY MOUNTAIN FORGE

The shop I started at fourteen

One video about blacksmithing, and by the end of that week I had a forge running on my dad’s shop vac blowing backwards under a bed of coals. It is a real business now — hooks, bottle openers, and whatever people commission.

It is still the clearest feedback loop I know. A weld either holds or it does not, and nothing about the piece cares how the day went.