About the Founder

Trust, empowerment, and security. Those are the values that have been solidified throughout my professional career.

Before I was a software engineer, I was a schoolteacher and administrator at Title 1 schools. Students were more often told what they were not capable of than what they were. At an inner city school in Oakland, CA, it was about freedoms students could not be trusted with because of how they might exploit those freedoms. At an arts school in Flagstaff, AZ, it was about what disability, impairment, or neuro-divergence meant they could never perform or learn at a high level.

I've found that people young and old often rise or sink to the expectations that are placed on them.

I've also found that real boundaries and consequences are necessary for safety and security. And those boundaries only matter if enforcement is real.

The values of trust, empowerment, and security have transferred surprisingly well to software development and systems engineering in the age of AI. Code is often a simulation of the real world, and software engineers often talk about it as if its parts have agency. Functions call each other and return results. Front ends and back ends agree on contracts and hand data off to each other. Untrusted code gets put in a sandbox, and each service gets only the permissions it needs to do its job. And with software starting to act more like people, the metaphors are now literal.

Rather than over-constrain AI models with arbitrary rules that they can find their way around anyway, I restrict them at the resource level, and let them run free otherwise. When given freedom and proper boundaries, the capabilities of these models can surprise you, just like people can.

These values also inform my client relationships. Rather than manufacture dependence on me, I give my partners as much access to and control of their systems as is reasonable. For one client, that meant giving their AI assistants scoped access to their production code and data. And they've loved it. They now have a tool to help them understand their own system on a deeper level and make simple changes as they see fit rather than going to me for every little question or change order.

If you're curious about what is possible and enjoy challenging yourself to find out what you are capable of, please reach out.