About
Spacecraft, then software
I trained as an aerospace engineer and started my career on the Space Shuttle. Most of what came after has been a long argument between engineering and everything else — and engineering keeps winning.
I design cloud systems for a living now, but the shape of how I work was set earlier, on flight hardware — where the math doesn’t care what you hoped for and a wrong answer has consequences you can’t argue your way out of. I’ve been chasing that kind of honesty ever since.
The work
I spent my first years at NASA’s Johnson Space Center on the structural and mechanical side of the Space Shuttle — the stress analysis that decides whether a piece of flight hardware is cleared to fly. It’s a good place to learn to respect a result you don’t like.
An MBA at Rice turned me sideways into consulting: new-product strategy for aerospace and automotive firms, then business-development work that pulled me back into NASA’s orbit — safety and mission-assurance on the Space Station’s flight-readiness process and the early Orion program.
The engineering kept reasserting itself. For the last stretch I’ve worked in enterprise cloud architecture — hybrid-cloud transformation at IBM, and now cloud consulting at Kyndryl, lately pointed at getting AI to do dependable work inside serious systems. Different hardware, same instinct: understand how the whole thing fits, then make it hold.
At the edges
The things I actually build tend to happen at the edges of the day job.
Galaxy is a multiplayer space simulator with real n-body orbital mechanics: several star systems, real planetary terrain, and spacecraft that rendezvous, dock, and land under honest physics. It’s where the aerospace training does real work again — and a running education in how unforgiving a numerical integrator can be.
Architect turns a cloud-architecture knowledge base into decision records, diagrams, and reports — the productized version of what I’d otherwise do by hand.
Then the smaller ones: a pool-chemistry dosing calculator that keeps chlorine and pH honest against stubborn source water, and a phone-first tool for pedicab drivers trying to find work and decode a city’s permit maze.
The common thread is problems where the feedback is honest — a spacecraft that either docks or doesn’t, a pool that either stays clear or turns green. The satisfying ones tell you plainly when you’re wrong.
Aerospace engineer by training, cloud architect by trade, and a builder of small exacting things by inclination. This site is where some of that ends up.