If you’re looking for my resume, the most recent version can be found on LinkedIn:

• http://www.linkedin.com/in/ashentemper

The TL;DR version

I’m Sean Dahlberg, and for more than 25 years I’ve helped build communities where people genuinely want to spend their time. That journey has taken me from online games like Shadowbane and Star Wars: The Old Republic to arguably one of the world’s best technology communities at Spiceworks, with a few unexpected stops along the way. These days, I write about community, leadership, games, technology, and whatever else happens to capture my curiosity as I figure out what’s next.

---

The Wall of Text version

My name is Sean, although some of you may know me by my online moniker “Ashen Temper“. I live in Austin, Texas. Currently, I am between roles and taking a little time to decide what my next career steps will be.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by the places where people gather. Sometimes those places are kingdoms filled with dragons, spaceships, and/or lightsabers. Sometimes they’re forums where an IT professional at 2:00 in the morning is desperately searching for someone who has solved the same problem before. On the surface, those worlds couldn’t be more different.

Underneath, they’re remarkably alike. People who aren’t just looking for help; they’re looking for connection. They’re looking to learn something, solve a problem, share a passion, or simply feel like they belong. I’ve been fortunate enough to spend most of my career helping create those kinds of places.

Growing up, my family moved frequently, and I attended nine different schools before graduating high school. Every move meant learning a new town, making new friends, and figuring out where I fit in. I didn’t realize it at the time, but those experiences taught me something that’s stayed with me ever since: communities don’t just happen. They’re built. One relationship, one conversation, and one shared experience at a time.

That lesson has guided almost everything I’ve done professionally.

My career began in online gaming before “community management” was a commonly recognized profession (the online version, that is, not the community association manager). I had the privilege of working on games like Shadowbane and Star Wars: The Old Republic, helping players connect with developers and with each other during arguably some of the most exciting years in the MMO genre. Those experiences taught me that successful communities aren’t measured by page views or registration numbers. They’re measured by trust. And that philosophy followed me into the B2B tech world.

Over nearly fifteen years at Spiceworks, I watched a community of hundreds of thousands of IT professionals grow into one of the best, if not one of the largest technology communities on the internet. Along the way, my responsibilities expanded well beyond community management into product management, audience engagement, developer relations, strategic planning, and leading talented teams across multiple disciplines. The titles changed over the years, but the mission stayed remarkably consistent: understand what people need, remove friction, and create experiences that keep them coming back.

In August 2026, I closed the chapter on my time at Spiceworks (for real this time). After nearly a decade and a half helping shape its community, products, and audience strategy, it felt like the right time to see what came next. That’s both exciting and a little terrifying, if I’m being honest.

The Appendix

I’m originally from Illinois (USA), but I’ve lived in quite a few places: various cities in Texas, Hawaii, California, American Samoa, and even Raiatea (one of the French Polynesia islands). I graduated from Fredericksburg High School in 1992 and shortly joined the U.S. Marine Corps, where I served with Combat Service Support Group-1 until I was honorably discharged in 1998. I stayed in California for a few more years after my honorable discharge, where I worked for a company called Catalyst Development.

While at Catalyst (and a bit towards the end of active duty), I was playing an online game called Ultima Online on the Pacific Shard. I played it for a little over three years. I started out in a guild called KMA (Knights, Mages, & Archers) but then ended up creating my own guild called SOV (Spirits of Vengeance). We did a short stint in a guild called The Knights of Glory and Beer, until going back to being a solo guild (with various allies… and enemies). I even ran my own shard “newspaper” called the Pacific Shard Times. About the last year of playing UO, I was also Ldy Death and created a “nation” called the Town of the Endless Graveyard (TEG). I also played as ImaBumpkin from Tryon’s ImaNewbie Does Britannia (I wanted to be ImaPK but… shrugs). You can read a bit about how UO affected me in “I grew up here: Ultima Online.”

I then started to play EverQuest when it first came out on the Rallos Zek server and joined the roleplaying community there called Rallos Zek Chronicles. I began as Anduril Valar and created the original Elven Guard guild, but later also created Kallystra, who was the “Daughter of Hate” in the Straylight Saga series.

About six months into EverQuest, I heard about a game called Carnage.net, which later changed to Shadowbane. The game wasn’t out (and wouldn’t be for some time), but what we did know about it made me want it. I was working at the Vault Network at the time and became a Site Manager for the Shadowbane Vault. Then during E3 2000, I applied for the role of Wolfpack Studios‘ (the development team behind Shadowbane) Internet Relations Manager (as Community Manager wasn’t widely used yet).

Before that, I never really thought about working professionally in the game development industry (remember, this is the early 2000s). What I did with all the different communities in UO, EQ, and SB was my hobby. But the idea definitely piqued my interest, and come June 1st, 2000, I was the first Internet Relations Manager for Wolfpack Studios. I moved from Yucca Valley, CA, to Austin, TX, and on my first day at the office, I got to buy myself a computer (an eMachine of all systems, haha!) and had a pool table and couch as my working area.

While at Wolfpack, I went from IRM to Live Event Team Lead, then to Community Manager when Ubisoft acquired the company in March 2004. Later on, I also became a Game System Designer. I spent most of those years on Shadowbane; I saw it through its development, launch, two expansion packs (Rise of Chaos and Throne of Oblivion), and its shift from a subscription-based to a free-to-play business model. I also worked on a few other projects that never made it to official announcements until the day Ubisoft announced it was closing down Wolfpack Studios in May 2006.

In June 2006, I helped form a new company from the ashes of Wolfpack called Stray Bullet Games. I still worked on Shadowbane and an untitled MMO, but this time I was the Lead Designer (of Shadowbane). I made a lot of changes to Shadowbane, some that people loved… some that they hated. Then in February 2008, I announced that I would be leaving Stray Bullet Games. I loved the company, had a lot of great friends there, believed in the project we were working on (as well as Shadowbane), but I got an offer I just couldn’t turn down. I was offered the position of Community Manager for BioWare’s upcoming MMO (at the time, the title wasn’t officially announced).

I mean, it’s BioWare (and this is BioWare in the late 2000s). The makers of some of my favorite games: Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Knights of the Old Republic. And, on top of that, it’s the Star Wars IP. Furthermore, the company was in my backyard… here in Austin; I wouldn’t have to move for it. So, yeah, I would have been a fool to let the opportunity pass me by.

And that is where I stayed for about the next two and a half years. Star Wars: The Old Republic was (and I am sure still is) an amazing project; I made some good friends and learned a lot while working on it. I had the privilege of hand-picking my team and had a large role in building the pre-launch community. And I got to work alongside some of the most talented people in the industry… There wasn’t a single section that didn’t do an amazing job: artists, writers, designers, qa, IS/IT, Audio, web, marketing, and, while I am very biased, the community department. But as we all experience in life, it was time for a change.

From there, I joined UTV True Games as a Senior Game Systems Designer on a project called Faxion Online. It was a free-to-play MMO that shifted the focus from leveling to fast-paced skirmish (PvP) gameplay. The game took place in a fantasy, war-torn world called Limbo, where the forces of Heaven and Hell fought for dominance. Players join the war by battling over control of the realms and denizens of the Seven Deadly Sins. While Faxion Online was a traditional MMO, it puts emphasis on customizable (multi-)class advancement, tactical and strategic combat, territorial control, having fun, and getting to know the community you were participating in.

Unfortunately, my time at UTV Ignition (which was True Games) came to an end. The studio closed down, and the downtime gave me a chance to re-evaluate what I wanted to do with not just my career, but my life. For personal reasons, I really wanted to stay in Austin (although one company almost made me reconsider: 38 Studios). I lucked out and found exactly what I was looking for when I was offered the position of Community Manager at Spiceworks, Inc, a company touted by Forbes as the “Future of Media” (at the time). This gave me a chance to learn community management from another perspective and also let me be just a regular gamer for a while.

I joined Spiceworks back in 2011. In 2017, we unveiled the new Spiceworks logo. As the company shifted from a software and advertising company to an internet company, we wanted to update our brand identity, too. Much like Spiceworks changed, so did I. My original focus at Spiceworks was to foster the brand representation program. Over the years, I was promoted to Senior Community Manager, where I led the Community Management Team, and later to Director of Community as my responsibilities grew. My role kept growing as I also took on management of our Scrum Masters (we opted to call them Agile Team Coaches (ATC)).

Then came August 2019, when Spiceworks was acquired by Ziff Davis. As with most acquisitions, it caused some personnel changes, and my teams were affected, but not all of it was negative. I maintained my position as Director of Community, but I also took on some new team members from the Toolbox community management team. In addition, it brought new challenges (and we Community people do love good challenges)… Under Ziff Davis B2B were multiple properties that serve various segments of businesses, such as Toolbox, MarTech Advisor, and HRTechnologist. While each has its own verticals it appeals to (and thus, its own culture), it raises the idea of unifying them under one network beyond the title (while still letting each keep its unique identity).

While the Spiceworks property remained(s), the company morphed into Spiceworks Ziff Davis (SWZD) in March 2020, where various other business units and properties all aligned under each other. In 2021, I kept working in Community Management (sometimes as a mighty team of one… myself), but towards late 2021, I also started working more and more in Product Management. This wasn’t a hard transition, since it wasn’t that different from being a game systems designer, so I was putting on some comfortable old shoes. Unfortunately, the multiple roles would start to take their toll, especially when I was offered the Director of Product Management role. As you can probably surmise, other things were going on as well. And while I wasn’t actively looking, someone approached me with another opportunity, and I ended up leaving Spiceworks.

Next stop? Cisco as the Head of Developer Community, more commonly known as DevNet (at least at the time). I only stayed there for less than a year (later, it’d be called my “paid vacation”), but I did enjoy most of it. I met and got to work with some phenomenal people, such as Paul Zimmerman, Jeff Bull, Brian Oblinger, and the oh-so amazing Erica Kuhl, who put up with my billion questions and revisions.

Unfortunately, I joined at a time when a lot of changes were happening– both in leadership and the BUs’ (business units) direction. We came up with some great strategies and plans, and even implemented a few. But the overall vision kept getting kicked back. Not because of disagreements, but because (yet another) leadership change would be upcoming, and we’d have to get re-approval. I do remember one version we did for a new leader where we talked about some of the aspects and used the leader’s favorite sports team as various analogies that went over really well. I’ll have to use that again someday.

Toward the tail end of my Cisco chapter, I was reached out to about Spiceworks potentially going through a period of transition, and that it would look to recenter around its pre-acquisition practices, making audience and community engagement and growth the priority again. I may have jumped a little too early, as those specific circumstances actually never came to be. As you may have guessed, I jumped back to Spiceworks in July of 2023.

My return was a bit different, as this time I wanted to keep a singular focus and not be split between community and product management. In my new role as Senior Director, Audience Engagement, I led the overall audience retention and engagement strategy, and my teams and teammates specialized in community management, (vendor) brand engagement, social media, and email marketing. Over time, as the team evolved (and shrank) through various transitions, I absorbed additional responsibilities and eventually managed much of what had once been handled by a larger team. After roughly two years of giving it everything I had, I intentionally stepped away in August 2026 to prioritize my health and take the first real pause of my career.

Right now, I’m giving myself something I’ve rarely allowed myself: permission to not have the answer. Yet. I’ve never been particularly good at slowing down, but I’m working on it. I’m recharging, exploring some personal projects, and resisting the urge to map out the next five years. So ask me again in a few months.