Leading Marines before engineers. A customer before a vendor.

I enlisted in the Marine Corps infantry and deployed to Iraq as an up-armored Humvee anti-tank vehicle commander. During one engagement, over the course of four or five days, my team evacuated more than twenty wounded Marines under fire. I received the Bronze Star with V for my part in it. Most of what I believe about leadership I learned there, through trial by fire. In some cases, literally.

After the Marines I spent about ten years at the FBI, eight active and two in an advisory role, on the mission side of counterterrorism. I was the technical owner for the mission, working shoulder to shoulder with the engineering teams and designing social networking algorithms before social networks had really taken off. That work grew into the FBI’s first big data program, earned a Director’s Award for IT Excellence, and some of what we built was still in use the better part of a decade later.

It also set my frame of reference for everything since: no organization cares, or should care, about technology for technology’s sake. They care about their mission, the outcome they’re charged with delivering. That comes first.

In 2015 I crossed over to the companies that made the tools I’d been using. That order matters. I was the customer before I was the vendor, and I’ve never forgotten which side of the table is harder.

At Hortonworks I led public sector engineering and served as CIO of Hortonworks Federal. At Cloudera I ran the government solutions business and later served as SVP of Cloud and Field Technology. At Neo4j I led a global organization of more than 200 technologists across sales engineering, professional services, and customer success. Today I’m Vice President of Solutions Consulting and Value Management at Workiva, leading a global team of about 200 across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC.

That history is the lens for everything I write here. I was using Hadoop to protect this country before I was designing solutions for customers. I was leading Marines before I was leading engineers. I keep my hands on real builds so that when I’m helping solve real problems in the field, I’m speaking from current experience, not a slide. My opinions come from a couple decades of using technology to solve problems that mattered, including debugging them at midnight in my basement.

About that basement. I run a personal data center at home with the full enterprise stack: virtualization, storage, networking, identity and secrets management, monitoring, backups, out-of-band management. I actively build and maintain an AI harness that helps me operate it. Keeping all of that alive keeps me ahead of what’s coming, because the problems are real and the pager is mine.

I also ship small projects because I enjoy making things: an e-ink bird frame that found a real audience, word games built as a tribute to the puzzles Charity and I play together, tools I share back to the homelab community. Small things, honestly. But they keep me sharp.

Underneath all of it is my faith. I serve in my local church, and the line at the top of this site is the honest version of my priorities: anchored in faith, focused on what lasts.

If any of that resonates, stick around. This is where I’ll link out to my projects, share my opinions, and host the things that mean something to me.