About

Born in 1974 into a world of Transformers, Garbage Pail Kids, and the Atari 2600. Grew up in Kansas. Spent time in Phoenix. Landed in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California, near Yosemite, and never left. Married Chrissie. Raised two sons. Built a career that zigzagged in a way that only makes sense in retrospect.

I manage the IT division for Madera County government. 33 people. About 1,000 end users. The work is infrastructure, cybersecurity, service delivery — the unsexy stuff that keeps government running. I love it because systems thinking is my native language.

I started freelancing in 1995. Design work. Tech support. Client services. The original "I'll figure it out" energy that defined early internet culture. I did that for 18 years while the world changed around me.

Then I sold newspaper ads. Then I ran youth programs at the Boys & Girls Club. Then I walked into Madera County's IT department in 2013 as an Analyst I and thought: oh, this is the thing.

Seven years later I was managing the whole division. Not because I followed a plan. Because each job taught me something the next one needed. Design taught me to see systems. Sales taught me to listen. Youth work taught me that leadership is about making other people better. IT gave me a place to use all of it.

I have ADHD. I don't say that as a disclaimer — it's a professional feature.

Pattern recognition. Systems design. Seeing connections others miss. The ability to context-switch between a security incident, a budget meeting, and a team coaching session without losing the thread. That's not despite the ADHD. That's because of it.

The 47 open browser tabs aren't chaos. They're how my brain maps the world. The hyperfocus isn't a bug. It's the engine that drives deep work when it matters. The restlessness isn't a problem. It's what keeps me building, learning, and pushing things forward.

I don't manage ADHD. I manage with it.

I do not treat newer tools like a moral crisis. I use what is useful.

I use LLMs, agentic workflows, automation, and whatever else helps cut the repetitive parts of the job down to size. Not because I want to sound futuristic. Because I want human teams to have more room for the parts of the job that actually matter.

For me, that comes back to customer experience. The useful version of technology helps us hear what people are actually saying, understand what they need beneath the first request, and respond with more context and more attention. It should make people feel supported instead of processed.

That is why I see these tools as support systems, not the whole story. Let the machines handle more of the repetitive work. Let people do more listening, more judgment, and more relationship-building.

I see the world in grey. Not because I don't have opinions — I do, loudly — but because nuance is where the interesting stuff lives.

Hot takes are easy. Understanding is hard. I choose understanding. That doesn't mean I'm wishy-washy. It means I've thought about it from more than one angle before I open my mouth.

I'm positive by choice, not by naivety. I've been around long enough to know that cynicism is the easy path and optimism requires effort. I choose the effort. I say "GREAT" instead of "fine" because life is too short for lukewarm responses and because it genuinely catches people off guard in the best way.

Still obsessed with gadgets. Still gaming. Still figuring out how things work. The Atari 2600 became the NES became the PlayStation became whatever's next. The Transformers became the MCU. The curiosity never changed.

I cook on a Traeger and a sous vide setup that would make a food scientist proud. I build iOS apps. I tinker with AI agent systems. I read about infrastructure and cybersecurity for fun. My idea of a good Saturday involves both a brisket and a keyboard.

A living digital presence that's equal parts professional and personal. It should work if a hiring manager finds it AND if a fellow nerd stumbles across it. The professional stuff is here. But so is the human.

This site is me trying to make the professional version and the personal version stop pretending they are separate people. The work is here. The human is here too. That feels more honest.

If you got this far, we should probably talk.