About
I like software with a job to do.
The short version
I'm a full-stack engineer in the Phoenix area with five years of full-stack experience. I spent four of them at Starbucks building production applications and the Azure infrastructure they ran on — SSO integrations against an enterprise identity provider, VM fleets behind load balancers, data pipelines feeding ERP systems, and the security reviews that came with all of it. I was promoted from Application Developer I to II, and in 2024 a Next.js app I built earned a Bravo Award and got adopted company-wide.
But the thing that shaped me most as an engineer is that I've never only written code for someone else's system. I run businesses on software I built. My agency maintains a fleet of live client sites. The pool-service company I co-own runs its field operations — technician portals, admin reviews, dashboards, an AI lead-intake bot — on tools I designed, shipped, and still maintain. When my code breaks, a technician in the Arizona heat can't submit his route notes. That kind of feedback loop teaches you things a sprint retro never will.
How I think
Five patterns behind the work.
- 01
Zoom out before zooming in.
A business owner rarely knows if they need a dashboard, an automation, or a process change. Neither does a product ticket, sometimes. I start with the workflow — who does the work, what information is missing, where time and money leak — and build the smallest system that makes it clearer.
- 02
Build to own it.
I chose to write my own multi-agent orchestrator instead of adopting an off-the-shelf runtime, because I wanted to understand and control every layer — and because the off-the-shelf one had a consolidation bug I'd rather design out than inherit.
- 03
Map the new onto the known.
New infrastructure gets anchored to the Azure, PM2, and VNET patterns I already trust. A new AI agent pattern gets understood as the same feedback loop I built for lead intake. I build durable mental models, not cargo-cult copies.
- 04
Security by reflex.
At Starbucks that meant NSG rules so the backend API was never publicly reachable. On my own VPS it means dedicated non-root service users and chmod 600 on every secret. Nobody asks for this. It's just how systems should be built.
- 05
Honest about the edges.
I'll tell you plainly what I'm deep in and what I'm still ramping on. I think that's a feature. The fastest way to stop being wrong about something is to say out loud where your knowledge ends.
Off the clock
I'm engaged to Maiya — we've been together nine years — and my family is all over Arizona. I sit on my HOA board (and yes, I rebuilt the HOA's website on Astro, because of course I did), and spend my tinkering hours on hardware — ESP32 boards, RF and NFC experiments with a Flipper Zero, serial and Bluetooth integrations. The pattern's the same everywhere: I want to know how the thing works, and the fastest way to find out is to build with it.
What I'm looking for
A software developer role on a team that values ownership — where understanding the infrastructure, the data flow, and the customer is considered part of the job, not scope creep. I bring an AI-native workflow (Claude Code, MCP servers, agent orchestration are my daily tools), enterprise production habits, and the judgment that comes from having been the person responsible when it's my system on the line.