I've worked as a software engineer for about a decade, primary in web development. While I'm capable poking around the whole stack, I'm most comfortable in the front end. I like to think about and appreciate the little details of software, while still balancing the bigger picture.

After starting out my career in a few SaaS companies, a desire for something more mission-driven work ultimately led me into civic tech, first with a vendor and now within government. My guiding philosophies are:

• Starting with why before what. Technology is rarely a solution in and of itself, just an enabler. A well-defined and well-explored problem begets a better solution. Start with goals and desired outcomes and work backwards from there.
• Keeping things as simple as you can reasonably achieve. Software engineering is all about managed complexity, i.e., complexity is typically inherent to the system. Code becomes tech debt the moment it's written.
• Strive for small cross-functional teams that have a shared understanding of their purpose. Organizational bloat is easier to add to than to take away from, so grow cautiously. Small teams can do a lot when they're empowered to.

A few personal things:

• I live in Minneapolis with my wife and two dogs.

• In the last five years or so, running has become a larger hobby, both for personal enjoyment as well as a way to engage with my community. I've been on the long and winding path recovering from a few injuries, but I continue to work towards getting back to running long distances.
• In the past, I've written and performed music. While my musical tastes and interests have evolved, I remain most captivated by weirder sounds rooted in improvisation, with various minimalism, ambient, drone, and electronic music catching my ears more in recent years. Any and all recommendations are welcome.

Email: [email protected]

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I hate that I have to include this, but such is the world we live in. While I've grown to accept the utility of AI for programming-related tasks, I'm not willing to let that extend to my prose. So much of my motivation for maintaining a personal site is to have a place to articulate and work through my thoughts; delegating that to an LLM seems to be beside the point. To quote this similar disclaimer:

Why should a reader be expected to spend their time reading something that an LLM operator did not consider valuable enough to spend their time writing?

While I hope to document my LLM-assisted programming flow at some point (maybe when it stops shifting every 4-6 weeks), I offer this guarantee: all prose on this site is written by me. While I'll occasionally use LLMs to help with copyediting and proofreading, the words themselves start with me.