Software Architect, Engineer & Leader
The pursuits, passions, and obsessions that fuel creativity away from the screen — and feed directly back into building better software.
Software has been a lifelong calling, but the best ideas rarely come from staring at code. These are the interests that provide balance, perspective, and the occasional adrenaline rush — each one a different lens through which to think about precision, creativity, and the satisfaction of mastery.
More than a career — a lifelong obsession that began with BASIC on early home computers and has never stopped evolving. From writing simple programs as a teenager to architecting distributed systems for Fortune 100 enterprises and national security agencies, the fundamental joy has remained constant: the satisfaction of building something from nothing.
The tools change every few years. The languages shift. The paradigms rotate. The obsession does not. If anything, the emergence of AI-assisted development has reignited the excitement of the earliest days — the sense that the ceiling has moved again and that genuinely new things are possible.
Training began at age five — decades before most people consider the practice seriously. Martial arts is not primarily about physical capability, though that develops as a byproduct. It is about cultivating a particular kind of mental discipline: the ability to remain present and composed under pressure, to act without hesitation when hesitation is the worst possible choice.
That discipline translates directly into engineering work. Complex systems under production pressure, high-stakes architectural decisions with incomplete information, teams in crisis — these require exactly the composure that decades of martial arts training develops. The dojo and the war room demand the same quality of attention.
Over ten thousand jumps from every altitude and aircraft imaginable. Numbers that far exceed the point where skydiving feels dangerous in the ordinary sense — at that volume, it becomes something closer to a moving meditation. The aircraft, the exit, the freefall, the canopy, the landing: a sequence repeated so many times it has become its own form of deeply practiced presence.
What skydiving teaches that nothing else quite replicates is absolute, non-negotiable presence. At altitude, there is no room for distraction. The mind cannot wander to yesterday’s meeting or tomorrow’s deadline. That quality of focused attention — the ability to clear everything irrelevant and act only on what matters right now — is one of the most valuable cognitive skills a person can develop.
10,000+ documented jumpsRiding since before most children learn to ride a bicycle. Over decades, motorcycling has evolved from youthful excitement into something more contemplative — a form of moving through the world that demands full attention to the immediate environment while offering a quality of freedom that is difficult to replicate in any other way.
The most meaningful dimension of motorcycling now is that it is shared. Riding with his wife, exploring backroads and highways together, is an escape from the digital world that both of them inhabit professionally. The road makes no demands other than attention. That simplicity is its own form of restoration.
From traditional hand tools to CNC routers and laser cutters, woodworking bridges the physical and digital in a way that software alone cannot. The intersection of engineering precision and creative expression, where the tolerances are measured in fractions of a millimeter and the satisfaction of a perfectly fitted joint is immediate and tactile.
The most ambitious project: a tiny house built from scratch. Every structural decision, every material choice, every joint and finish — a single project that demanded competence across carpentry, electrical, plumbing, and systems integration simultaneously. It was, in essence, the physical equivalent of a full-stack build.
Hundreds of watches collected over the years — mechanical, quartz, vintage, modern, wearable, display pieces. Horology is an appreciation for a particular kind of engineering: miniaturized, intricate, mechanical problem-solving that predates computing by centuries and achieves its results through purely physical means.
Every great timepiece is a small monument to precision craftsmanship. The best watchmakers share something with the best software architects: an obsessive attention to the interaction between components, and an understanding that reliability at scale requires getting every detail right, not just the visible ones. The movement you cannot see is the one that matters most.
Hundreds of timepiecesSpinning since the vinyl era through the cassette era through the CD era through the digital revolution. Each transition brought new tools and retired old ones, but the core skill remained unchanged: reading a room, managing energy, and making real-time creative decisions under social pressure.
DJing is, at its core, real-time programming with immediate human feedback. There is no staging environment. The crowd either responds or it does not. The ability to read that feedback instantly and adjust — to shift the tempo, the energy, the selection — is the same responsive intelligence that makes a great technical lead effective in a room full of stakeholders with competing needs.
Guitar and drums provide a creative counterpoint to the structured, logical discipline of engineering. Music is problem-solving with an emotional dimension — the rules exist, but so does the space between the rules, and learning to work in that space is what separates competence from art.
The most honest thing about music as a discipline: you hear the mistakes immediately. There is no compiler error, no stack trace, no log file. The feedback is instant, visceral, and public if you are performing. That immediacy builds a different kind of quality consciousness than writing code in isolation — one that, when carried back into engineering, produces better instincts about when something is right and when it only looks right.
“The best engineers are polymaths — the discipline from martial arts, the precision from horology, the creativity from music — it all feeds back into building better software.”