May 2014 Introductions

[justin]

Hi fellow water sports lovers! I’m Justin Gordon and I’m one of the founders of this website.

I first came to Maui in 1995 for windsurfing, and fell in love with Maui on my first trip. 5 years later, in 2000, I started a 8 year relocation project where I gradually moved out of San Francisco and to Maui, to my own place, Sugar Ranch Maui. Maui is a bit like San Francisco, in that your biggest problem is that there is too much good stuff to do. Over the years, I got more into surfing, especially at bigger days at Hookipa, and stand up paddle racing, and less into windsurfing, and I’ve been inching back into kiting. Besides these sports I practice yoga almost daily, go on prone paddleboard downwinders, and occasionally road bike around the beautiful scenery of Maui.

You read about me at the following links:

• Rails on Maui
• My facebook Page
• My Sugar Ranch Facebook page

And here’s my post on why we’re launching TalkSurf.com:

Why we're starting talksurf.com?

I asked @Garrett for some questions to spark up the talksurf forum: How the hell does Justin have so much time that he can spend on creating a surfing forum? I love using discourse.org sites for Ruby programming. In fact, I wrote about this a year ago at my Rails on Maui blog: Getting Started With Discourse. Here’s a short list of why this is unbelievably cool: It’s a Rails/EmberJs open source application. It was founded by Jeff Atwood with Sam Saffron and Robin Ward. Jeff created StackOv…

[steve]

Hi there!

My name is Steve de Brun, and you can find me here on TalkSurf as @steve. I’m a friend and business partner of @justin, and a lover of surfing, SUP, kitesurfing, swimming, and pretty much anything that gives me an excuse to get in the water. Over the past 10 years, I’ve developed an interest in SUP’ing and kitesurfing, initially in response to my fatigue of surfing in crowds in the Southern California blight, and then as I discovered the challenge and flow of both, they took on a life of their own. Now I prefer to kite in the waves or SUP unless the waves are really, really good or larger in size.

I range from Mexico to Northern California in search of good wind and waves, and have traveled as far as Australia, Morocco, most countries in Central and South America and Hawaii. In the near future I’d like to get to Indonesia, Morocco (again), and down to Ecuador, Peru and Chile (again).

When I’m not in the water, I find myself building digital products - apps and websites - as well as applying my design skills to logo and branding projects, creative direction, and creative strategy. More about me at debrundesign.com and on LinkedIn.

Below are a couple pics of me on my (now old) Naish 9’6", as well as a mug shot. I’ll post some kiting pictures soon as well, just need to buy a few from a local guy here who snapped a few of me on a clearing wind day in Los Angeles.

Aloha!