This is a snapshot of what I’m focused on these days, professionally and personally. It’s a now page, so it changes as I do.

Last updated October 2026.

Work

I’m an independent software architect. These days I’m leading architecture for Kafka and Flink at a Fortune 50 healthcare company, which has me deeper in stream processing, Confluent Cloud, and Terraform than I’ve ever been. A lot of my time goes to the unglamorous parts: how you load-test a topic, how you notice consumer lag before it becomes an incident, and what a platform team needs in order to move with direction.

I also run a small consulting practice, Castanea Systems, for teams that need help with distributed systems, event-driven architecture, and the backend work around them.

Things I’m Building

Role Model

A Go and Python system that analyzes job descriptions and builds resumes from a single, human-written source of truth about my career. Every generated bullet traces back to the job it came from. It started as a way to stop my resume from drifting away from reality, and it’s become my main playground for practical LLM work: structured retrieval, provenance, and keeping models honest. A few of the posts here came out of it.

Budgeteer

An envelope-style budgeting app for my household, because nothing I tried fit how we actually think about money. FastAPI, PostgreSQL, and background jobs, with some AI-assisted spending insights layered on top.

This site

Recently redesigned and moved to its own domain. Writing here more regularly is part of the plan.

What I’m Learning

  • Flink, both Flink SQL and the operational side of running it
  • Go, still working to replace my standard of more than 2 decades (Java)
  • Durable workflows and job queues (Temporal and River in particular)
  • Using AI tools well, without handing them the parts that need judgment

Topics I’m Thinking About

  • How senior engineers keep growing technically after decades in the industry
  • Where LLMs genuinely help in engineering work, and where they quietly make things worse
  • What it takes to make a platform team effective rather than just busy

Outside of Engineering

When I’m not at a keyboard, I enjoy:

  • playing bass guitar
  • drawing with graphite and charcoal
  • reading science fiction and fantasy
  • building things from wood with my hands
  • organizing systems and workflows, sometimes a little too much

Philosophy

I like building software that is understandable, maintainable, useful, resilient, and, when I can manage it, beautiful. I’m less interested in hype and more interested in practical engineering that helps real people solve real problems.