cat about.md
I’m a platform and agentic engineering leader based in St Paul, Minnesota.
Over the past few years my own workflow has shifted toward agentic development, and that shapes what I want to build next: software factories, where agents and people share one path from idea to production. I’m most interested in the interfaces that make this work, both for product developers and for ambitious builders inside the enterprise.
Underneath that is more than a decade of cloud infrastructure and platform engineering. Most recently I was the architect and technical owner of the platform under every Prisma AIRS product at Palo Alto Networks, which I joined through the Protect AI acquisition. Before that I led field engineering at Onix, and spent six years running my own consultancy, Run at Scale, mostly embedded in Google Professional Services on large GCP deployments. I started out in network operations at Big Fish Games and the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.
I lean on a lot of boring but effective methods of yesteryear. They’re the foundations that keep teams and agents safe.
How I work
I adapt to the situation, but I’m generally biased toward:
- Doing over analyzing. Production-quality deliverables are the goal. I study the problem space but dive in quickly to learn the domain.
- Showing over telling. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a demo speaks volumes.
- Communicating in multiple mediums. Code, talks, docs, diagrams, decision trees, and slide decks. Ideas are only as useful as your ability to communicate them.
Outside of work
I love nothing more than creating. Sometimes that’s tinkering with tech to build something cool or novel; sometimes it’s drawing with pastels or painting oil on canvas. For me, the creative process is everything.
I’m a husband and a dad to two girls, and they get most of my time away from the keyboard.
I grew up an athlete and a wrestler (now recovering), and I never really stopped training. I’ve run half marathons, done powerlifting, and carried grappling into adulthood through Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I’m also a scuba diver, a Technician class ham radio operator, and an aspiring pilot.