About Me

I've spent twelve years as the person a system can't run without. Not because I hoard the keys, but because I hold the whole thing in my head, or learn it fast enough to get there. Most of the work since has been making the surface where I'm needed smaller — handing engineers clean, well-scoped problems so they can own and grow their own piece of a platform instead of routing every decision back through me. That only holds if the ownership is defended, so a good part of the job has been keeping things off my team's plate: taking the meeting myself, or turning down an ask that isn't in scope and wearing the friction that comes back.

A pattern keeps showing up across every job I've had: building things so growth doesn't require tearing them down and starting over. Early on, that meant writing a config loader that could handle field rules for request types nobody had defined yet. Later it meant an onboarding process where new clients came in through configuration, not code changes. More recently it's meant engineering a skill system our AI tools and developers read against, so cross-system knowledge lives in the skill repository instead of only in my head. Build the right shape once, then let the next person, requirement, or tool extend it without disturbing what's already there.

I've never let myself get boxed into one stack. I started in Java, spent years owning a 60-terabyte data platform, and now move between Java, Vue, and whatever the problem calls for. Deep technical ownership and leadership have never felt like two different jobs to me. The instincts that make you good at one make you good at the other.

Judgment and candor drive most of what I do: tell me what's actually happening even when it's inconvenient, and I'll do the same in return. I question everything I don't understand or that seems unnecessarily hard, which has a way of surfacing assumptions a whole team has been carrying without realizing it. That instinct is also most of why I mentor. I've spent years with Code Connector, a volunteer community helping people from non-traditional backgrounds break into software, because the question that unlocks someone's understanding is usually worth more than the answer itself.

Outside of work, I'm married with kids who keep life full, and most of my remaining hours go to this site, side projects, and whatever tool I'm currently taking apart to see how it works.