About

I believe in using technology, through the application of sound software engineering practices, to solve problems. Software Engineer puts too much emphasis on the tool that I use, and not the thing that I do. The things I am most passionate about mirror my work and education: stewardship for the environment and more effective human collaboration.

After twelve years as an engineer, I spent seven leading teams — at CloudBolt Software, then at Heroku and Salesforce, where I ran teams focused on Data, Internal Tools, and AI Platform infrastructure. In 2022, I decided to stop being a manager and go back to writing code. I have no regrets, and a lot of useful scars.

These days I’m a Staff Software Engineer at Aptible, building Managed AI services on a HIPAA-compliant PaaS. If you’re building AI products that need to handle protected health information without a compliance nightmare, that’s where I live.

The studies I took on at Portland State gave me a primer in Linguistics and deepened my fascination with using technology to help people communicate better. I co-founded a machine learning and speech recognition startup, got a paper on AI ethics published at PICMET, and hold a cloud compliance patent. The through-line is figuring out how machines and humans can work better together.

Alongside my (arborist) wife, my volunteer hat includes being a crew leader for Friends of Trees, where we help make our city a greener place to live. We share a small home in inner southeast Portland where our family raises chickens and tends a garden — and love living in a diverse city with things to do.