Frequently Asked Questions

You're not wrong, in many situations this would definitely be a bit much. But there really is a good reason behind this. First off, I am very deliberately, as many other pieces of this site will make clear, reinventing myself and changing the overall direction of my career. It's also a very important to stress that this is not a casual thing. This is a large change and one that is extremely important to me. So with that in mind, and the fact that I really do feel that I have a few special things to offer. I think this really is worth it. The way I look at it is this, obviously in any kind of routine process of evaluating someone's resume or job application, I might not get far enough in the process for someone to even bother looking here. That said, if they do, I think this could make a huge difference. The most important reason it might make a difference is to get me at least an initial interview with anyone that has a bit of a clue. Why would that matter? Well, you'll have to go to the next question to find that out.

Let me be frank. I'm very smart and well educated, but there are many who are both smarter and much better educated than me. I do have a few supper powers though. One is how my brain operates when engaged with new information. When engaged, I digest information in real time and figure out how it fits into my understanding of the world. As I get a bit of a footing in the meeting/discussion/etc, I start to put together an operating model of the problem space under discussion and soon I have enough of an understanding to start forming hypotheses and ideas. These might be about a solution, things to try, or just jumping ahead a bit to intuitively anticipate what is coming next, or what the implications are of what I have already digested. One example of how this effects me is my comfort with interviews. I actually love job interviews. I love the challenge of interacting with others and having the opportunity to not only engage the nature of the work and the position they are trying to fill, but love the challenge of trying to actually offer constructive responses that not only demonstrate my understanding formed in real time, but also what I'm bringing to the table. I often start with highlighting what I do NOT know, what experience I DON'T have, but then following that up with why I still believe that ultimately I have more to offer in the long term than your average, or even above average candidate.

I think that this and other aspects of how my brain operates is part of the reason I feel so strongly that this is what I was meant for. I know I could have a very satisfying late career doing general agent development and context engineering, but what I think I am best suited for is to be research adjacent. I don't have the education and experience to do actual research in this field, and might never, but I'm confident that if placed in a room with researchers, I could start to contribute meaningful ideas fairly fast. Most importantly I would really be able to understand what they are trying to do and be in an especially strong position to support their efforts as an engineer and developer.

I think I'll start by saying that at this point in time, I am more than just confident—I basically know that the most important work I will do in my career will happen in the next 10 years and will be in the AI space. I would also say that I couldn't be more excited for this next stretch. I honestly feel that this is what I've been waiting for my entire career. I was made for this.

The closest I've ever come to this feeling was about 13 years ago when I first truly discovered business intelligence. I had been working around data for a good bit of my career, so it certainly was nothing new to me. But I'd never really had all the different principles and disciplines that are involved in BI and data analytics brought together and explained to me until I ran into that information through multiple paths at that point in my career. Just as a bit of trivia, I dove deep into Pentaho, and built an extensive solution around that stack at the manufacturing company where I worked at the time. I could tell that it was something that I just grokked. It was something that just made sense to me. I understood it at a level that, the more I talked to the average tech professional, was not common. They didn't seem to get the essence of what was possible, and I really felt like I had a lot to add to that space. So I embarked on a new career in that area, even though it got derailed. Almost every day I have a moment when I just get a big cheesy grin on my face as another puzzle piece falls into place for me!

I have to chuckle because obviously I wrote these questions myself, so I'm playing to a closed audience. I'm very much an invested and passionate person. If I had a reasonable means to save the world or make a huge change, it would definitely be on my short list. While I've certainly had plenty of jobs and long stretches in jobs that felt like I was just punching the clock or just getting mundane things done, that's not only not my comfort zone or preference—I would actually argue that to some extent it's a weakness. I am not at my best when I'm punching the clock, when I'm doing something mundane, and when I'm just a cog in a machine. I am at my best when I am challenged, when I am learning something new, when I am fully engaged, and when those things come together in the right mix. I literally feel like there's nothing that I can't do, learn, or figure out.

I have often felt that there was something more I could do. I've never been a huge activist or someone that's gone out to actually try and save the world, but I've always looked for opportunities to do more, to be involved in things to at least some degree, and to find something that I can completely sink my teeth into. Other than music and certainly at times my job and my work, I just haven't gotten a lot of that out of many aspects of life. But that really changed when I finally dove into the deep end with AI. With AI as a primary tool set in my hands, I truly feel like there's almost nothing I can't do, can't learn, can't contribute to. There are plenty of people smarter than me—I'm smarter than a good majority of people out there. I could certainly use more formal education, but I have a crazy ability to grok things in real time. Within 4-6 weeks of jumping into the deep end with AI, it was crystal clear to me that the world was about to go through a change that might even exceed the effects of the industrial revolution, and very importantly, nothing that I could see was going to stop this evolution, or even slow it down.

Yeah, this one definitely shows my age. I read "Stranger in a Strange Land" in high school I believe, and it definitely left a huge impression on me. I immediately understood—notice how I resisted the temptation to say grokked there—what grok actually meant. Starting as early as junior high, I was one of those people that just understood things. Part way through high school, I genuinely felt like I had a pretty good understanding of the universe and everything. Yes, I grew up on Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Monty Python for that matter, so definitely strong influences there.

But that term has always made sense to me. That said, I've not always been happy with how it's been co-opted because I felt like there was a smaller subset of us that really understood what it meant. One person I truly believe understood it was Richard Feynman, who I've idolized since I first found out about him, which was ridiculously late in my life and literally late in his, since shortly after becoming a huge fan, only to find out that he had already passed away. If I could use one word to describe how I naturally engage information in the world around me, how I wish to lean into that engagement, it would be grok. And that really comes from the deeper understanding of what is meant by that word: it goes way beyond just learning something. It gets to the essence of it being part of your blood, part of your DNA, understanding it intrinsically, you are able to see the gravitational effect it has on the space around it, being able to derive from it. It goes so much further. I made my call out to Richard Feynman because I really believe that he understood that and made comments to that effect many times. Actually, a great book to read is "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman," and specifically his story about his experience teaching in Brazil.

Well, quick history: I was born in New Mexico. We moved to Sitka, Alaska when I was in kindergarten—this was 1973—and I grew up and graduated from high school in Sitka. I can't really stress enough the influence Sitka had on my life. It wasn't the same influence for everybody. For me it was a combination of things coming together that really made a difference. It was the combination of Sitka itself being isolated on an island, on the ocean, surrounded by mountains—just an incredible place.

It was also the fact that when I was in 6th or 7th grade, a new public radio station was formed by the community in Sitka, and it was a huge effort, really beyond the norm. This effort at the start of the station brought in some people that have international reputations when it comes to public radio, namely Rich McClear who became the station manager and helped start the station. It also formed some people that are internationally known in that field. I grew up with Brian Mann, who is now one of the leading correspondents for NPR—we went to high school together. And then Marika Partridge, who was a family friend before the station even started, was my first mentor at Raven Radio. I worked with her over the years, including playing Irish music. She went on to direct All Things Considered in DC for 15 years I believe, and did numerous things after that, being involved in public radio most of her life.

There was also an incredible music camp in Sitka that had a huge effect—the Sitka Fine Arts Camp. Every summer starting in 7th grade, I believe, I went to this arts camp which just happened to be in my hometown. People came from all over the country to go to this camp, and I just got to ride my bike from home there each day and have the most incredible immersive experiences as a musician and artist in an incredible community. It definitely had a huge influence on me. The real key thing though is that growing up in Sitka with these influences, me and my friends truly felt like the world was our oyster. We did not see this small town isolated on an island as limiting. To us, if anything, it was exactly the opposite. Many of my high school buddies, when they graduated, moved to the four corners of the globe—one of them went to Oxford in England, another went to Sweden. People went all over the place. They certainly did not feel like they needed to stay in town, go to University of Alaska, or just go down to Washington state and call it good. We saw the entire world as our playground and truly felt like anything was possible. I'll save the rest for elsewhere, but this covers the start.

That's actually not at all how it played out. I'd be lying if I said that I didn't get a start in tech early. I was one of those geek kids in junior high that was into role playing games, reading as much as I could get my hands on, and super into tech, what there was of it then. We got an Apple IIe computer at the school while I was in 7th grade, and not a single adult in the school knew what to do with it. It came with a book on DOS and a book on the BASIC programming language. It didn't come with a single actual program to run, that we were aware of at least. All that I had was that information and the disks that came along with them. So the first thing I ever did on a computer was to program, and the reason I even had access to it is the very nature of how unknown the tech was for the adults and the fact that I and a couple of my friends were very safe and known entities. They trusted us to go play with it and figure it out. I'm sure we had stern instructions on not breaking anything and being careful, but they pretty much just let us at the thing. So yeah, that was the start—line numbers and everything, creating Hello World programs in 7th grade with an Apple IIe. The first computer I bought was a VIC-20, which I got a couple years later at a Kmart in New Mexico while visiting relatives, but never did too much with it.

But yeah, I started early. However, I was headed on the path of becoming a music teacher, and I was on that path for a ridiculously long time, all throughout junior high and high school. I think I started to decide by 8th grade, being pretty confident that's what I wanted to do, and that was my college path. I did a lot of things along the way there, but I was in no hurry. I was an academic at heart, didn't feel pressure to get done fast. I was enjoying the journey of life and taking opportunities, doing different things.

It wasn't until my early to mid-30s that I finally woke up one day living in Seattle, still going to school, still working towards my music ed degree but getting pretty close. I found myself working a contract job at a company doing tech work—was actually one of the key people in the QA department. Multiple things led me there, but I just suddenly realized: wait a second, I'm making more than twice as much money now as I would after 20 years of teaching. I love what I do. I've already done a bunch of teaching, and I'll do more teaching in the future, I'm sure. I think this is really for me. And that's kind of where it all began in earnest. Looking back, I never really formalized the education too much more. I did some more schooling after that. I have enough credits for almost two bachelor's degrees. But to be transparent, I never completely finished a single bachelor's. Never felt limited by it, and certainly I've now got the experience behind me to overshadow that pretty easily. But I definitely had a great academic run and got into tech full-blown starting in the mid-90s.

I guess to be honest I answered this to some degree in the first question. The bottom line is I've been using AI on and off since it kind of first came out. I mean, I'm a true geek in the tech world, but I can't claim to have been following things in machine learning and the AI front too much at the time. I did a bunch of work with AI help on an Azure functions app, using VS Code with Copilot quite a bit during that. But that was at least three years ago, so we're talking about code completion and not a whole lot more. It was a huge help, I leveraged it quite a bit, but it certainly didn't leave me feeling like "oh boy, this is the absolute future." I still felt that things were pretty limited and I really didn't have too much of a feeling of where things were going. After that project, I was busy with many other things, focusing on new projects and just getting things done. I just didn't really realize what was going on in that world.

Fast forward to a couple months into this year, and things were changing at my employer where I'd been for over 11 years. We were being bought by a huge company and we had a new project that was going to be a major new solution for us. We were definitely trying to do this new project in the most ideal way possible, and that totally fed into my wheelhouse. I was already operating essentially as a senior systems engineer at the company, and I was definitely very interested in getting involved in this project, which involved a full cloud solution in Azure (mainly due to that being our comfort zone). The intent was to have it fully orchestrated and to do the entire process as ideally as possible. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to pretty much own the infrastructure as code orchestration project for the start of this new project. From the start I was using VS Code, I was using Copilot in agent mode with just ChatGPT initially. And I was doing something I'd never done before—I was dealing with Terraform. I was dealing with even more than that because I was kind of ambitious. I designed the project such that I needed Terragrunt to really make it work. I was really leaning into AI from the get-go and was getting things done at a pace that was just insane, not only with actual coding but with documentation as well. I became best friends with ChatGPT's Deep Research Mode and put together, with a bit of iteration, some incredible technical documents with that aid.

As I got deeper into things and watched things evolve and change at such a revolutionary pace in those first few months, my mind started to catch on really fast as to what was really going down. The first epiphany was a Friday night—actually I think it was within one week of starting on this new path. I sat down in my recliner at home with my phone, earbuds in, and I was trying out ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode for the first time. I had a Plus account so I had access to it and a little bit of time. I didn't stop using it for a couple hours. I think it was kind of a fluke because I never got more than like 30 minutes of time in a day after that. But I swear I spent like an hour to two hours that night, and I was stunned by the end of it. Absolutely hands-free, seamless interaction. I could rant for long stretches and it didn't seem to lose anything. I'm not suggesting it had 100 percent perfect transcript per se, but it was constantly evaluating what I said and bringing it all together and digesting it. I had the most incredible in-depth conversation about things. It was definitely very much a sycophant and trying to tell me a lot of things I wanted to hear, but I could still read between the lines to see the more frank and sincere feedback rather than just something it thought I wanted to hear.

Soon after that, I think the next thing was either Cursor or Claude Code, and then starting to use Claude Opus models. Those were in pretty rapid succession—incredible finds, incredible experiences that really opened my eyes to what was going on. Pretty soon in this process, I not only was observing myself working at a level, operating at a level, motivated at a level that I had almost never seen in my career, but I was having a blast. And I absolutely realized that this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my career—no questions whatsoever. And it wasn't just that I wanted to do it. It was clear to me that this was going to be the single biggest thing I would ever do in the tech space and with my career. Outside of music and my family, of course, but this was it. This is what I was made for.