Failed mathematician & philosopher. Mediocre engineer.
Or so the terminal says. The truth is less humble: I chased proofs and first principles, found I was better at building the thing than theorizing about it, and have spent nearly six years in identity and access management shipping scalable platforms—with a low tolerance for hacks and zero patience for ladder theater.
These days I build the systems that decide who gets through the door and who gets, very politely and entirely within protocol, shown the exit.
For the first half of my career I performed a second, unpaid job on top of the paid one: impersonating a normal person, because being visibly neurodivergent in corporate America was an efficient route to a severance package that read like a ransom note. I have ASD-1. When I finally stopped spending sixty percent of my processing power performing “normal,” I got the sixty percent back—and my thinking got sharper, purely out of relief.
So I started saying what I actually thought, using the reading I’d actually done. Practically, that means integrating LLMs into production systems that survive real users, replatforming monoliths onto Kubernetes without downtime drama, and refusing to let “just one more hack” quietly become load-bearing architecture. I’d rather ship something boring and correct than something clever and cursed.
I’m a nihilist, precisely: nothing matters on its own, which leaves exactly one source of meaning—you, deciding, and then being on the hook for it. The meaning I’ve chosen is this: the people the machine is trying to grind down are usually the most worth keeping, and I happen to be standing close enough to jam a wrench in the gears. The work I’m proudest of usually has someone else’s name on the commit.
I measure a career in people, not titles.
The number I’m proudest of isn’t a promotion or a comp band. It’s the count of engineers who are better because we worked together.
I was writing software as a kid and sitting in Microsoft Dev Connections sessions at eleven—the youngest person in a room full of adults arguing about APIs. Engineering wasn’t a pivot; it was the first thing I was ever good at.
A tutorial system in Maths and Philosophy, with minors in History and Biblical Studies—people who resemble cathedral gargoyles handing you a reading list and then vivisecting your arguments, live, three times a week. Being wrong loudly and in public turns out to be excellent training for engineering.
For a long stretch I was a genuine careerist of the worst kind—ambitious, credit-grabbing, quiet when I should have spoken up. Then one morning I woke up in a house I owned, no debt, no dependents, a title that would let me name my terms—and felt precisely nothing. So I changed.
Nearly six years in identity and access management, most recently staff engineer and tech lead at Auth0. LLMs in production, monoliths replatformed on Kubernetes, teams that outlast me. No debt, no dependents—the one credential HR can’t revoke—which means I can afford to mean it when I say no, so I do.