About

I'm self-taught. I dropped out of college out of boredom and frustration, tired of listening to my fellow Computer Science students complain about having to learn code, which was one of the few things I actually found interesting. I started automating systems at Texas A&M, where I managed web operations and Unix system infrastructure for the College of Architecture using Chef. While at Texas A&M, I also led a digital transformation push at the college level, working across departments in other colleges to consolidate shared services and stop duplicating things that didn't make sense to duplicate.

From there I joined Rackspace, helping mid-market and SMB clients automate with Chef. During my early days, I helped organize a major shift in how we supported customers and taught system automation through Rackspace University.

When the business pivoted focus from Chef managed automation to AWS, my team transitioned from support to professional services and I was part of building that practice from the ground up inside Fanatical AWS. I started teaching AWS architecture once the pivot was underway, and I worked with a few other Rackers to build Jetstream, our internal tool for validating and publishing standardized CloudFormation templates. I built tooling that let our support Rackers manage client environments more easily, including a tool that could orchestrate commands and scripts across fleets of EC2 instances in a single shot. Around that time AWS released the Python runtime for Lambda, so I built lambda-uploader because manually packaging Python Lambda functions was annoying.

In 2016, while I was still at Rackspace, a drunk driver's Suburban pinned me underneath its axle on a highway at 2 AM. Respiratory failure followed. Doctors put me in a medically induced coma to stabilize me. I came out of it with a sharpened sense of what matters and a low tolerance for artificial barriers and performative bullshit. When you've stared down mortality, office politics lose their grip. I supported probation over prison for the driver in my victim impact statement. I was alive. That was enough.

After Rackspace I spent a couple of years deepening my delivery experience across cloud practices at CloudReach, Hitachi, and Connectria, before settling into pre-sales solution architecture at Onica. That's where I started partnering directly with sales executives to close business.

I continued that work at Caylent, where I was instrumental in winning their early enterprise clients after they refocused as an AWS company in late 2021. In 2022, our first full year operating as an AWS-focused business, I was responsible for $15.4M in revenue. Every year after, I was responsible for over $10M. I'm not a salesperson by background, but I learned the work because it's the same instinct as the engineering work: understand what someone actually needs and build a path to it.

Alongside the pre-sales work at Caylent, I architected and coded IRIS, an AI-powered sales operations platform that automated Caylent's sales lifecycle by integrating Salesforce, Slack, Gong, and JIRA. It featured dual RAG systems with self-healing query validation, dynamic schema introspection, and conversational workflows with persistent state. We were running sophisticated AI agents in production well before anyone was calling them agents. IRIS surfaced the right information at the right time, held pursuit teams accountable, and built team culture through automated celebrations and collaborative features. It was a real system solving real problems, not a demo with "AI" slapped on it.

Today I'm a Technology Leader at Launch Consulting Group, where I've been pioneering how we use agentic coding tools across both our delivery teams and our clients. I spend a lot of my time optimizing and teaching how to actually get value out of Claude Code and GitHub Copilot, and I've built tooling to make the hard parts easier. Most of what AI adoption actually needs right now isn't more technology; it's clear thinking about what people are trying to accomplish and a refusal to confuse motion with progress.

Art

I did 3D work with clay and paper in high school, then dropped it for years while I built a career in tech.

In 2022, during a stressful time in my life, I picked up oil painting and haven't looked back. I work across landscapes, portraits, abstract pieces, and still life, mostly in oil but increasingly in watercolor, gouache, graphite, and ink. I paint when the work is done. The making keeps me balanced, and the discipline of it shows up in everything else I do.

How I work

To quote K.A.A.N., I "call it like I see it from my eyeline."

I'm direct, specific, and I don't like to hedge. I'd rather have a hard conversation upfront than a soft one too late, and I expect precision in language from the people I work with. I take care of my team, I see through hype, and I hold myself to a higher bar than I hold anyone else.

Ping me if you're working on something and want to chat.