Who I Am
Two decades of IT leadership, web development, and technical problem-solving — building systems that work and teams that deliver.
I Own It
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I don't wait to be told what needs to happen. I figure it out, make the case for it, and see it through. I'm the first to celebrate when it succeeds — and just as quick to speak up if something's going wrong. That's not a personality quirk. It's the backbone of who I am, whether I'm suiting up for work or not.
That standard is what carried me from marketing into technology in the first place — once it became clear I was more intrigued by the systems I worked with than the campaigns that ran on them. What followed was eleven years as a technology program manager for a 2,500+ account membership organization, with all the responsibilities and none of the staff. From platform strategy and infrastructure modernization to vendor relationships and training — I covered all of it for over a decade, fully remote and fully accountable.
Running solo like that teaches you how to succeed when there's no one else to hand things off to — and to value a team all the more when you have one. I've carried that forward into everything since — directing a green energy startup's full technology portfolio, co-founding my own consulting practice, and building teams of my own when the work called for it — asking the same questions every time: what does this actually need, and how do I make sure it gets it? That's the job. I own it.
I Build IT
Building, for me, means two things. It means finding out what people actually need, then creating the systems that deliver it — sites, platforms, tools, whether that means starting from nothing or rebuilding what's already there but isn't working anymore. And it means doing the same for the structure behind those systems: building the governance where none exists, or reshaping it where it does, without compromising security or function either way. I've spent my career doing both, often at the same time.
The hands-on side is the part most people don't expect from someone with "manager" in their title. The assumption is that once you've leveled up, you stop getting your hands dirty. That's not me. I build sites from scratch — this one included — and I've led two full website redesigns for a national nonprofit over an eleven-year span, executing the builds myself rather than handing them to an agency. You can't effectively lead a project or a team if you can't understand how the work actually gets done.
The other side of building is less visible but just as real. At more than one organization, I've established security policies, incident response procedures, and vulnerability management programs from the ground up — true creation, not updates to something that already existed. Other times the job was different: taking a structure that existed but had been outgrown, and reshaping it to actually work. Either way, when an organization has no centralized IT function, someone has to build the rules before anyone can follow them. That someone has usually been me.
I Decipher It
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I'm drawn to the moment before anything makes sense — a system nobody's documented, a team that's stopped trusting each other, an organization that knows something's wrong but can't name it. That's the work I actually want: reading the situation, separating what's really happening from what people think is happening, and turning it into something clear enough to act on. Not for credit. I do it because until someone does, nothing else moves.
I've had to do it in rooms that couldn't be more different from each other. A national nonprofit with no IT department — 34 years of accumulated workarounds by the time I arrived. A bank, where the stakes were legal and the language was compliance. A startup, post-breach, where trust was gone and someone had to rebuild it fast. My own consulting practice, sitting across from business owners who don't speak "tech" and don't need to — they need someone who can translate their problem into a plan. Different rooms, different vocabularies, same job: figure out what's actually going on, then make it make sense to the people who have to act on it.
That's what I bring to whatever comes next, whether the work is leading a program, managing a project, or building the thing myself. Give me the mess. I'll tell you what it actually is — and what to do about it.
I Log Off
When I'm not deep in a project or building something new, you'll find me in worlds someone else built — anime, manga, games I actually finish. I'm a cosplayer too; that's me as the Lone Wanderer from Fallout, because apparently even my downtime needs a project.
I'm also writing a book series, which might be the most honest hobby on this list — I spend my working life making complicated things clear for other people, and my off hours making up new complications entirely.
Professionally, people tend to read me as an extrovert — I'm comfortable presenting, comfortable in a room, comfortable being the one who talks first. But I recharge alone. That combination has served me well leading teams: I can hold a room, and I still know how to sit with a hard problem in silence until it makes sense.
Let's Connect
Interested in working together or just want to talk tech, gaming, or storytelling?