About
I've been curious about how things work for about as long as I can remember — tearing into BIOS settings and CMD prompts on my family's first PC as a kid, soldering pickup wiring into guitars later on, producing music on the side mostly because I liked understanding the software as much as the sound. None of that felt like a career plan at the time. It just kept happening.
If there's a pattern across the jobs that came after — machining, pipefitting, payroll tax, application support, freelance IT — it's that I keep noticing where a process is bleeding time or money and doing something about it. As a machinist, that meant realizing a batch of parts could move between machines in a different order, which ended up saving the company millions over the long run. In an office, it usually looks like a script, a stored procedure, or lately, an agentic workflow standing in for what used to be someone's Tuesday afternoon.
These days that curiosity mostly lives in software development, systems administration, and business/process analysis — sometimes all three in the same afternoon. I'm comfortable writing a SQL stored procedure, comfortable explaining to a non-technical stakeholder why it matters, and comfortable being the person still keeping a system online after the company that built it has changed hands twice.
What I bring
Software Development
IT & Systems Administration
Administrative & Business Analysis
Also poking at, with less production mileage: Ruby, Go, Rust, PHP, FreeBSD — and, further back, TensorFlow and other ML libraries for image classification/generation and NLP experiments, back when practical AI tooling was still new.
On process, I adapt to whatever's already established — but left to my own devices it's usually a blend of Agile and Kanban with a few ITIL habits mixed in, and I lean harder on documentation than strict Agile calls for, both in writing and in code that's readable enough to explain itself. Same logic applies to testing and tooling: I reach for whatever's idiomatic to the ecosystem I'm in rather than rolling something custom. Reinventing that wheel is just technical debt with extra steps.
Where it's come from
~4 years combined
Skilled Trades — Plumbing, Machining & HVAC Pipefitting
Apprentice plumbing work built early fluency with measuring, pipe systems, and heavy machinery/tools that carried directly into CNC machining (panel saws/routers via proprietary control software and manual macro programming, CAD blueprint reading in AutoCAD/FreeCAD) and later HVAC pipefitting (pipe take-offs on commercial refrigeration builds). Spotted a better sequence for routing components between machines that cut long-term production costs into the millions — an early instance of the efficiency-hunting instinct that recurs throughout this timeline.
While completing a BBA
Business Administration & Financial Foundations
Deep Excel/Access/PowerPoint work and financial analysis coursework, plus hands-on bookkeeping and audit-prep for a small business's CPA.
PEO, domestic programs
Payroll Tax Specialist
Multi-jurisdiction tax filings, payments, and account administration, and liaison between the tax and application-support departments. Started automating recurring filing work in Excel VBA.
Same PEO, expanded role
Application Support / Business Analyst
T-SQL against production databases (dynamic SQL, stored procedures, SSRS), Symmetry Tax Engine administration, Zendesk ticket ownership, WordPress/site admin, employee access and infrastructure basics (FTP/SFTP, SSL, remote server administration over SSH and RDP), and version control across a wide — often legacy — toolset (Git, SVN, TFS, VSS, Fossil). Built and maintained a DocuSign-integrated electronic enrollment system, including the data migration and user acceptance testing to bring clients onto it. Also kept core systems running through several rounds of company ownership and vendor transitions.
Concurrent
Self-Directed Study — Software Development
Perl, then Python (Flask/FastAPI/Django, pandas, SQLAlchemy), C# (.NET Core, Entity Framework), and Node.js/TypeScript/Express — alongside daily Linux use (Debian, then Fedora, some Arch/FreeBSD), bash scripting, and Docker Compose. Built a demo app around ChatGPT's API — adjustable model/temperature settings relayed in real time over SignalR — early hands-on work with LLM integration, later formalized through Anthropic's AI Fluency, Claude Code, and prompt-engineering coursework. Learned through a mix of books, Codecademy, Udemy, Pluralsight, and audited coursework from Harvard and other institutions. Eventually replaced the old VBA automation habit with pandas and openpyxl — same problem, better tools.
Larger, national PEO
Payroll Tax Analyst
Reconciliations, bulk data automation, and utilities moving data between Excel, internal REST APIs, and PDF output. Informally supported IT and development work alongside primary payroll duties, until the role was affected by pandemic-era restructuring.
Current
Freelance IT Consultant
Builds and maintains client tooling (Entity Framework Core across SQL Server/MySQL/SQLite/Redis, PDF generation for billing statements), migrates legacy apps to Azure, DigitalOcean, and WordPress-optimized hosting, and hardens/administers Linux infrastructure (nginx, certificate-based SSH, fail2ban/ufw, Let's Encrypt). Has also stood up disaster recovery and business continuity plans, built small-business web presences from scratch, automated internal accounting/tax-payment tooling with forecasting and rightsizing built in, set up internal comms (Mattermost) and reporting stacks (Crystal Reports or Jaspersoft, fed by a Tomcat server), and once hand-built an authentication system just to understand the mechanics end to end — production work still leans on vetted auth libraries. Increasingly reaches for agentic AI workflows to cover ground outside core expertise, like front-end work, faster and more reliably.