Built from the
ground up.
Stays for results.

I'm a husband and father first. Everything else — the career, the writing, the late-night AI experiments — exists inside that context. My family is the reason I show up with full effort and the reason I go home at a reasonable hour.

Music is the other constant. I worked at Native Instruments before SaaS — in support and on the engineering technician side — which means the records aren't just a hobby, they're a through-line. Soul, R&B, jazz, Latin funk. I still dig through crates the same way I used to pull apart hardware: looking for the thing that doesn't quite fit the category.

I studied political science — international relations track with a diplomacy concentration — which sounds like a strange detour until you realize that enterprise CS is, at its core, applied negotiation. The frameworks from those classrooms — finding shared interest, holding a room with competing agendas, communicating with precision under pressure — are the ones I use every week. My professors would probably find that either gratifying or deeply ironic.

Food gets the same attention. Cooking, eating out, finding the hole-in-the-wall that no algorithm has discovered yet — Austin has been very generous to that particular obsession.