Forged between coal and code.
Senior Software Engineer · Georgia · Appalachian roots · Remote
I design software systems, AI workflows, and the guardrails that keep both honest. My work starts where a cheerful demo usually stops: failure paths, ownership boundaries, and proof that survives contact with production.
I grew up in a coal-mining town in southwest Virginia and built my career in Georgia. That background left me suspicious of waste, fond of repair, and deeply interested in systems that explain themselves.
Claims should have receipts.
- Projects documented
- 20
- Currently active
- 14
- Recorded awards
- 3
Awards
The rules are short on purpose.
Name the boundary.
A system becomes governable when ownership, input, and refusal conditions are explicit.
Make failure visible.
Quiet fallback is how a defect earns seniority. Errors should arrive early and with evidence.
Automate the proof.
Tests, scanners, and release gates handle repeatable verification. Judgment stays human.
Theme song: “I Build Things”
Twisted Game Songs
I’ve called “I Build Things” my theme song since the first time I heard it.
Most of that is Appalachian ingenuity. I was taught to fix what breaks, reuse what still works, and take a thing apart just to see how it works. I’ve been dismantling systems, and occasionally putting them back together, since before I had the word for them.
The rest is how I build software.
I design systems by hunting the failure first. If a thing can break, I assume it will, and I would rather find it before production does. Nothing irritates me more than shipping a “done” deployment and needing a hotfix an hour later. If I deployed it, the failure should already have been found, understood, and closed.
The song lands on both halves of that: the pleasure of building the thing yourself, and the conviction that breaking it early, loudly, and on purpose is what makes it ship clean and stay that way.