Who Am I?

I’m a maker and a teacher. I live in Snohomish, WA and work at Ethyca as a Staff Software Engineer on data privacy and governance—mostly making sure the platform can scale as our customers grow. Before that I was a Principal Engineer at Microsoft on Dapr and Azure Container Apps, co-founder and CTO of YourBase, and a Solutions Architect and Well-Architected performance lead at AWS. Along the way I’ve helped build things people actually use, including Alexa, CodeDeploy, Goodreads, and tooling at Chef and Expedia. I’ve also written books, taught at several universities, bootstrapped startups, consulted, dabbled in geospatial programming, and built deployment systems that ran millions of times per week. See my résumé or CV if you want the longer version.

On the side I’m building Konstruct—developer tooling to make AI assistants smarter about the code they’re in, with a code graph, safe sandboxes, and workflows for ideas, designs, and plans.

Computers have been part of my life for as long as I can remember. My dad brought home the first PC in our house literally the day I was born (I must have been holding out for a good birthday gift). Programming the Logo turtle in first grade started a lifelong habit of taking things apart, putting them back together, and building new things on top.

I’ve tried to pass that curiosity on to our kids. Our daughter is an occupational therapist now. Our son is into mechanical engineering—engines, speed, and anything that goes fast.

Those early interests in computers, math, and science led to a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and a stint as a Ph.D. candidate in Environmental Systems at UC Merced (incomplete, but formative). Around age 12 I discovered Linux and FreeBSD via Walnut Creek CD-ROMs from a Bay Area computer show—Red Hat, Slackware, Yggdrasil, and friends—and spent plenty of late nights getting X11 working and learning how operating systems actually behave.

I still like hard problems, learning new things, and helping other people figure stuff out. Teaching at the university and community college level has been especially rewarding—you never stop learning when you’re teaching. Other interests include embedded systems, environmental engineering, data visualization, math, and programming.