THE CAPABILITY
MATRIX

Typing class on Apple II—Oregon Trail and Number Munchers between lessons. Checked out "BASIC Computer Adventures" from the library and spent hours copying code line by line. BBS culture on Hacker's Haven and Prodigy. Flight Sim, Commander Keen, and Tetris. Then the internet bloomed and competed for the phone line. This is where the obsession started.

Hand-coding HTML tables when the web was barely walking. This is where it started professionally—before frameworks, before Stack Overflow, before "best practices" were documented. 25 years of continuous context means I've survived every tech bubble, every paradigm shift, every framework war.

Implemented and troubleshot tablet-controlled trap and target systems for FBI shooting ranges. Revolutionary at the time—controlling live-fire range equipment from a tablet when most agencies were still using mechanical switches. Mission-critical environments taught me early: "glitchy" isn't in the vocabulary.

Certified Flight Instructor teaching students to fly, then flew commercially for Great Lakes Airlines before studying physics. Aviation teaches systems thinking under pressure—checklists matter, redundancy saves lives, and there's no "move fast and break things" at 10,000 feet. These principles transfer directly to mission-critical software.

First internship: growing carbon nanotubes and nickel-plating them at the molecular level. Learned to code using National Instruments LabVIEW and sensors. Used Zemax for the hologram project at HoloRad (Kepler project). When you've manipulated matter at nanoscale, you treat data schemas with the same absolute rigor.

Led physics lab instruction and taught hundreds to build with Bubble.io. Teaching reveals what you actually understand—you can't fake expertise when someone asks "but why?" Training non-technical founders to ship products without code taught me to translate complex systems into clear principles.

Supported everything they offered: WordPress, Magento, Django, Joomla—if it ran on the open web, I debugged it, scaled it, and kept it alive under load. Graduate education in how software fails in production. Not theory. Real failures at 3am with angry customers.

Led the deployment of a massive Adobe Experience Manager platform supporting 260+ franchisees. This wasn't just technical implementation—it was navigating franchise politics, multi-tenant performance, and distributed governance. Enterprise architecture is 50% code, 50% organizational psychology.

Led a team responsible for 4 revenue-generating sites selling insurance policies. Migrated from Ruby on Rails to PHP—not for the résumé, but because the P&L demanded stability over hype. Make architectural choices based on business metrics, not what's trending.

Built a bespoke inventory management system for a global industrial-scale water filtration manufacturer. Translating complex physical workflows—assembly lines, supply chains, quality control—into lean, efficient SQL. Good software disappears into the business process.

Stood up both internal process software and public-facing assets. Marketing and business development projects essential to startup survival. Learned that "building cool tech" means nothing if it doesn't solve the right problem. Startups teach you to ship or die.