I like knowing how things actually work.

Most of my professional life has been in business operations — the unglamorous layer where hand-offs stall, spreadsheets multiply, and everyone has a slightly different story about how a process is supposed to run.

That seat taught me to notice friction before anyone writes a requirements doc. I got used to mapping who touches what, where data goes missing, and which steps exist only because nobody had time to question them. Software, when I eventually started building it, was a way to change those systems instead of just describing them.

I didn't arrive at software from a computer science classroom. I arrived from wanting the work itself to be cleaner: fewer manual loops, clearer data, tools that matched how people actually operate.

Once you start automating a workflow, you bump into the real questions — where the data lives, what the API will and won't do, why a machine is configured a certain way. That curiosity pulled me toward backend systems, Linux, and the infrastructure those applications sit on. I wanted to understand the stack, not only the interface.

I enjoy peeling systems apart. Networks, filesystems, databases, the path a request takes through a server — those details change how I design anything above them. Homelab and infrastructure work is part of that: running machines, breaking things, and learning why they broke.

That same instinct shows up in product work. I would rather map the real process and the data model first than decorate a screen. The interesting part is the system, not the demo.

These days I spend my time on software development — especially backend work in Go and the Linux/networking/infrastructure around it — and on shipping useful applications with AI-assisted development as part of the workflow, not as the whole story.

I also care about privacy and security as practical constraints, and I like the entrepreneurial loop of spotting a problem and trying to turn it into a working product. None of that is a finished identity. It's the set of interests I keep returning to.

I'm deepening as an engineer: stronger backend fundamentals, more comfort with systems programming and operations, and a clearer body of work I can point to. The portfolio is the professional case. The project catalog and writing are the trail of how I actually get there.

This page will change as that path changes. That's the point of keeping it here instead of locking myself to one job title.