I’ve spent most of my career trying to understand how things fit together. Not just the code — the people, the problems, the business. I think the best software comes from developers who care about all of it.
how I got here
I started out as a database administrator. For about five years I designed schemas, tuned queries, produced reports, and kept data flowing in healthcare and education systems. It was great work, and it heavily shaped how I approach my work today, but after a while I had some ideas that I wanted to build from the ground up.
In 2010 I started a small software company. I did a ton of work for very little money, learned an enormous amount, and eventually teamed up with some friends to co-found iApotheca Healthcare. That’s when I really went deep on full-stack development with the LAMP stack (Started with Vanilla PHP, then Codeigniter, and then Laravel).
These days I’m a tech lead at Lumion, a company I genuinely believe in. It’s progressive, mission-driven, and lately the work has been especially fun — AI tools like Claude and Codex have pulled me back into hands-on coding after spending a lot of time in planning/architecture/management mode. I’m writing more code now than I have in a long time, and I’m loving it.
how I think about building things
I almost always start with data structures and flowcharts/data-lifecycle before I touch the front end. A lot of people want to start with the UI, and I get the appeal, but I find that when you nail the data model first, you catch a lot of problems early.
More broadly, I think there’s a shortsightedness that creeps in when developers just address tickets without thinking about the bigger picture. A ticket is a small piece of a product, and a product is a tool that real people rely on. The developers who build great software are the ones who understand the people using it. No matter how much tech you know, success comes down to how well you understand human needs.
My go-to stack is Laravel, Livewire, Filament, and TailwindCSS — but I also have written some pretty neat high-math pieces in golang, and of course, I love databases and whatever else fits the problem. Check out my uses page for the full picture.
beyond the screen
I live in Edmonton, Alberta with my partner Nina and our son, who arrived this past year and promptly rearranged all of our priorities in the best way. Both of my sisters and their families live nearby, along with my parents, so there’s no shortage of family time.
I spent a few years training in the gym with a personal trainer and got hooked on the process — tracking progress, seeing effort compound over time. That same mindset bleeds into everything else I do. I read a lot, both fiction and books on productivity and business. I journal obsessively in Obsidian using a blend of the PARA method and the Bullet Journal system. And I’ve been chipping away at a math degree part-time since 2021, though the baby has slowed that down a bit (haha).
For the past decade I’ve also freelanced and consulted through platforms like Upwork and Fiverr — it’s been a great way to stay sharp across different industries and problem spaces.
say hi
You can find me on GitHub, or poke around the blog where I write about things I’m learning and building.