ABOUT · FULL BACKGROUND
By day, federal cloud.By night, a basement full of boards.Same rules apply.
BASED IN INDIANAPOLIS
The throughline
I started on a 24/7 watch floor. In the Air Force I ran directory and authentication services across 121 sites, where an outage is measured in how many people cannot log in to do their jobs. That is where I learned the thing that still runs everything I do: a system you do not understand end to end is a system waiting to break, and 'it's fine' is not a state you can read off a dashboard.
From there: network defense for a federal finance agency, then eight years and counting leading cloud operations and platform engineering on federal Azure. Azure Government, identity, and the compliance work that decides whether anything ships: CMMC (the Defense Department's security certification for its contractors), NIST 800-171 and getting systems an Authority to Operate (ATO). I stood one platform up from nothing in three environments, delivered it on a date named twelve months in advance, and built the console, runbook, wiki and monitoring so that no one person, including me, has to be in the room for a release.
The rest of the time there is CB Labs: a basement of boards, printers and displays where I build the whole thing, not the demo. A voice assistant whose audio never leaves the house. A wall sign with six designed states for when its data goes bad. Golf-cart parts modeled against a phone scan and measurements of the actual cart. A night lamp whose eight parts passed 51 dimension checks before any was printed.
The method does not change with the project. Capture the real state. Design the failure modes first. Rehearse before deploying. Verify with a number, not a feeling. Write the handoff before you forget why. I build systems I can verify end to end, and I write down what broke.
By the numbers
- 12+
- years in IT
- 1,000,000+
- served. Users on the authentication services I've run.
- 3
- environments built from nothing
- 7
- test gates every Concord change must pass
- 906
- LEDs driven from one lighting controller
- 37,000
- feet up: the first aircraft my basement radio decoded
How I work
- 01
Check the state, not the intent.
Home Assistant reported a device in one state while a sensor showed another. An ADS-B frame counter reported 'frames' that were not aircraft. Dashboards describe intent; read the endpoint.
- 02
One run is not evidence.
I built a regression gym for the voice assistant and found 7 of its first 50 cases flaky when I ran it three times. A card-drop fix counted only after 120 simulated drops.
- 03
Design the failure states before the happy path.
The wall sign's screens are designed for six states: normal, loading, empty, stale, offline, alert. Silence is not data.
Seen inSignal Beacon
- 04
Rehearse, then ship the rollback before the deploy.
The sign has a full offline rehearsal on my desk, and its deploy script dry-runs, snapshots and can put it back. The deployment console enforces its gates: the safety-critical ones can't be overridden at all, and the rest need a logged reason, an approver and a timestamp.
- 05
Print a test piece before the part.
A 19-minute test print of the latch goes on the printer before the ten-hour vending-machine body. Once the speaker pod fit the cart, no later revision was allowed to move a surface that touches the cart; the outline got rounder, the contact faces did not.
- 06
Write it down where the next person will look.
Dated handoffs, a manifest naming the one file to print, a print sheet with every part's orientation. Removing the dependency on a specific person being present is the deliverable, at work and at home.
Stack
Cloud & platform
Azure and Azure Government: App Service, Functions, API Management, Cosmos DB, Azure SQL, Redis, Event Hubs, Storage, Key Vault (HSM), App Configuration, Entra ID, private endpoints. AWS mapped service-for-service; GCP for Cloud Run and Vertex AI. Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Docker, Kubernetes.
Seen inConcordApp-Control Signing PipelineDeployment Evidence Console
Security & compliance
CMMC 2.0, NIST SP 800-171, RMF / ATO, WDAC application control, STIG-hardened environments, Zero Trust; OAuth 2.0 / OIDC and the JWT lifecycle.
Seen inApp-Control Signing PipelineDeployment Evidence ConsoleConcord
Web & APIs
Cloudflare Workers, Hono and Zod, Durable Objects, Workers KV, OpenAPI 3.1, React and Vite, MapLibre GL, Flask, Playwright.
Seen inGolfdarGrill Index
Embedded & firmware
ESP32-S3, -C3, -P4 and classic ESP32; Raspberry Pi; Jetson Orin. ESP-IDF, Arduino / PlatformIO, ESPHome, LVGL. HUB75 matrices, round GC9B72 panels, I²S audio, MQTT, DDP, RTL-SDR.
Fabrication
Bambu P2S and A1 with AMS; Blender driven by Python; trimesh with the manifold engine; CadQuery and OpenSCAD; phone photogrammetry as the spec; PETG, PLA, TPU; published on MakerWorld.
Local AI
Ollama on RTX GPUs, faster-whisper, Piper, microWakeWord, Home Assistant Assist as the tool layer, a regression gym, agentic coding tools with custom skills, plugins and MCP servers.
Seen inOrvynThe Agent Wall
Timeline
US Air Force: directory and authentication services from a 24/7 operations center across 121 sites.
Booz Allen Hamilton: network defense engineer for a federal finance agency. Intrusion detection, incident response, continuous monitoring.
EY (Ernst & Young): lead cloud operations and platform engineer on federal Azure. Platform ownership, application control, compliance automation.
CB Labs LLC, Indianapolis. The lab itself is years older.