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About
My world is the screen. I'm obsessed with technology: the systems, the architecture, the problem-solving. That's the engine. But the dopamine hit is watching someone actually use the thing you built. Building products that people click, touch, swipe, tap, and genuinely get value from? That's what keeps me up at night. I've had this fascination since I was a kid, and over 20 years later it hasn't faded. If anything, it's gotten worse.
I started writing code around 11, building tools and systems around the games I played. Content management for my gaming community, bots that automated things that shouldn't have been automatable, custom game maps. I built things my friends and I wanted but couldn't buy, and it got me hooked. That turned into a development internship at a local news station as a teenager, and I never looked back. I've shipped software across gaming, social media, travel, proptech, sports tech, field services, fintech, payments, e-commerce, hosting, cloud infrastructure, and media. From massive-scale consumer platforms serving hundreds of millions of users to scrappy startups where I was racking and stacking servers, writing deployment scripts, and acting as the entire infrastructure team. The breadth is the point. Every industry, every scale, every fire has shaped how I think about building things.
That exposure taught me something: everywhere you look, the same problems exist. The industry changes, the domain changes, but the architecture decisions, the scaling challenges, the trade-offs are universal. Once you see that, the problems themselves become the fun part.
I've been brought on to take companies to the next level. The approach is always the same: get the architecture right first, because without it you can't build the right products at all. Then force clarity on the problem, because that's what tells you what to build. Once the problem is clear, the architecture circles back to provide the right solution, and when the problem inevitably changes, good architecture means that change is a configuration, not a rewrite. Every shift in requirements should be expected, not a bug.
Today I'm a VP of Software Engineering. I lead engineering, DevOps, and architecture. I own delivery. I still write code, review PRs, debate system design, and get in the weeds when it matters. The best engineering leaders never lose touch with the craft, and I lead from the front.
After coming back to Utah from San Francisco, I founded the Salt Lake City Developers meetup because I missed having a room full of technical people to just rant with, drinks or not, about the things we're passionate about. Your favorite internet junkie with a love of all things digital and bacon-based.
Location
Utah, USA
Role
VP, Software Engineering
Focus
Architecture, Product & Delivery
Approach
Architecture enables, problem clarity directs
Architecture needs to be right to enable building the right products. Without it, you can't build anything worth building. That's why I obsess over protecting it.
Architecture tells you what you can build. Problem clarity tells you what you should build. I force clarity on the problem first, because if you can't articulate it, you don't know what to build.
When the problem changes, good architecture means the solution is a configuration change, not a rewrite. Every shift in requirements should be expected, not a bug.
Internal platforms, CLIs, and tooling that make engineers more productive and happier. The team's velocity is a product of how good their tools are.
High-performing teams with autonomy, trust, and a shared sense of craft. Culture is a feature, not a side effect.
Contributing to and maintaining projects that solve real problems. Code should be shared when it can be. The community makes us all better.