Hi, I'm Dave.
I'm the founder of Refuge and an application security consultant based in San Francisco. For over two decades I've worked in offensive and defensive security, leading penetration tests and red team operations for everyone from early-stage startups to global enterprises. My day job is finding the weak spots in other people's software before someone with worse intentions does.
I run that work through EOF Security, where I'm Chief Hacking Officer. After years of seeing how apps actually handle the data people trust them with, I wanted to build a journaling tool I'd be willing to use myself for the honest entries: the ones at 3am, about the things that actually keep me up.
Practice
Alongside the security work, I've been a Buddhist practitioner since 2009, training with the Center for Pragmatic Buddhism. The practice of clear, honest self-examination is something I take seriously, and I think it deserves a space that takes your privacy just as seriously. Refuge is shaped by both halves of that: a security engineer's instincts about what should never leak, and a practitioner's sense of what makes self-reflection worth doing in the first place.
Why Refuge
Most journaling and mood-tracking apps treat your entries as fuel: for ads, for analytics, for training someone else's model. Refuge is built the opposite way. Your journal text and analysis data are encrypted on your device with a key only you hold. Not me, not advertisers, not AI training pipelines. The whole architecture exists so that the most personal thing on your phone stays that way.
I built Refuge because I couldn't find it anywhere else. I hope it becomes that for you too.