My Story

Not many kids brought a screwdriver to the dinner table, but one of the earliest photos of me shows exactly that. A toy in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. That toy was either broken or about to be. Growing up, it was rare that broken things were replaced. Being curious, broken things got explored, taken apart, and if I was lucky, fixed. What started as curiosity became a methodology. I began learning how things worked by deconstructing them, eventually developing a talent for making them not just functional again but fundamentally better. My Nerf guns lasted longer and fired farther. My bike chain stayed on, and my brakes started working again. These childhood experiments taught me something powerful: exploring leads to understanding, understanding enables improvement, and systematic improvement transforms possibilities.

I carried that mindset into my professional life. While I still love building things that work well, my greatest impact comes from identifying where organizations depend on manual coordination and building the infrastructure to replace it. At GitHub, I found a coordination problem that was consuming entire teams with repetitive manual work. The solution wasn't optimizing the process. It was redesigning the system so one person could operate what previously required many, and scaling it until it became the standard way the company coordinated its highest-priority engineering work. In government, I applied the same approach to secure software delivery, contributing to a platform now adopted across all branches of the U.S. military.

Curiosity's real power isn't personal exploration. It's building systems that multiply what others can achieve. I've designed governance frameworks that codify decision authority across entire engineering organizations, built AI-assisted evidence pipelines that treat every automated output as untrusted input requiring human judgment, and created executive reporting infrastructure where none existed. When I see someone spending valuable hours on manual coordination, I don't optimize the process. I redesign the system so the coordination happens automatically.

Knowing what happens after I move on is how I measure success. The coordination system I built was transitioned to a new team and operated independently for over 18 months. The exception governance model I designed became the foundation for a company-wide compliance platform. The AI methodology I developed was adopted across the program management organization. Nineteen peer reviewers across 29 feedback sessions independently described the same pattern: builds systems that outlive the builder.

That's me. At my core, I remain that curious kid with a screwdriver, just with better tools and a broader canvas. The pattern has been the same across every role: understand the system deeply, build the infrastructure to solve it at scale, prove it works, and hand it off.