The name "Badwater" comes from the lowest point in North America. Badwater Basin is 282 feet below sea level in Death Valley. The name felt right for work that keeps circling back to the same territory: the desolation of spirit, but also the beauty of discovery in unique settings.
My name is Dom. I run Plateworks, which is a hub for my projects, from Tecopa Plateworks, a map-printing service that beautifully renders your GPS tracks on topographical maps, to Ignition, a weather log and calculator for wildland firefighters.
I'm based in Reno, Nevada. My day job is in wildland fire, which means I spend part of the year in an operational and logistical mode, managing squads, a fleet of vehicles, and firefighting equipment as our crew travels to rugged environments in service to the American public.
The rest of the time I'm here, writing about the mechanics of how people might actually work. Human Design has been inspirational for my writing the past year. If you're unfamiliar, it's a system that maps decision-making patterns, energy dynamics, and the specific ways individuals may be wired to engage with the world.
I use it as a practical tool for understanding why certain strategies, routines, and business structures work brilliantly for some people and completely collapse for others.
I try to limit the mystical language because I'm more interested in the engineering of it: what your chart says about how you process information, where your energy is reliable, and where you've been borrowing someone else's operating manual.
Travel and photography show up a lot on this blog because I spend a lot of time moving through Nevada and the southwestern deserts. Empty highways, range-turned-canyon landscapes, small towns with promises of more history than population.
Everything else here are philosophies and spiritual practices that I'm chewing on, observations from fire seasons, an occasional deep dive into esoteric systems. This is a place where I think out loud. Some of it connects and some of it just needed to go somewhere.
If you're here because you're curious about Human Design and tired of the breathless, over-spiritualized version of it, you'll find a constantly-improving encyclopedia I've been working on here, called Plateworks HD.
As a warning for design.plateworks.org: I'm still developing the site, and I'm working very hard to discover an architecture for the site that speaks to me. To test out new architectures, I've drafted a lot of pages with AI. I have full intent to replace it all with my own writings as I find the time. Apologies if some of it is inaccurate or annoying to read. My blog is entirely AI-free.
If you're just here because you just like desert photography or you stumbled in from somewhere else entirely, that's great.
Projects
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Ignition
Web app live, iOS beta
The fastest PIG calculator and fire weather log.
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Tecopa
Live
Your GPS tracks on beautifully-rendered topographical maps.
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Undercurrent
iOS beta
Loop your audio files underneath any other audio/video player on iOS.
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Plateworks HD
Live
A rich atlas of Human Design.
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Last updated 09-14-2026.