Operator first. Engineer by conviction.

I have spent 20+ years in IT — support, administration, management, and director-level leadership across infrastructure, security, and operations. I've run data centers, managed migrations, developed workflows, and kept the lights on through incidents that would have taken down less disciplined teams.

In 2021 I made a deliberate pivot toward software engineering. Not a departure from IT — an application of it. I am currently the IT Manager/Director for an Agricultural Manufacturing business in Northeast Kansas. Everything I built in infrastructure: the dependency modeling, the failure mode analysis, the runbook discipline, the change management rigor — all of it transfers directly to writing good software. The compiler just gives faster feedback than a helpdesk ticket.

I prefer direct communication (not rude, just precise), process-first orientation (not rigid, just disciplined). I have a hyperfocus that goes deep when something is interesting, and zero patience for plans that exist to protect someone's feelings rather than deploy the right solution. These traits can be liabilities in corporate politics. They are assets in engineering.

The homelab is where theory becomes practice. Proxmox Cluster, Docker Swarm, cascading Traefik ingress, Gitea, Woodpecker CI with Kaniko builds, Authentik SSO, and a growing list of services I own end-to-end. Every piece of infrastructure I manage is also a learning environment. There is no "I'll figure that out later" when you are the on-call.

Current focus: shipping the Mosaic Stack to a production-ready state, developing the Mosaic Framework for AI-assisted delivery, and building this site into a genuine record of the work. I am open to engineering roles and collaborative projects that reward operator-level systems thinking.