About

I was born in Fort Worth, Texas, but my family moved to western Montana when I was three — so I claim Montana. We settled in Kalispell the summer before fourth grade, and that's where I grew up. Western Montana has a way of getting into you: winters on the slopes snowboarding, summers hiking, fly fishing, rafting, and boating, with golf mixed in whenever the weather allowed. It's a hard place to leave, and an easy one to miss.

I went to the University of Montana and studied geology. Eventually I needed to actually start a career, and an opportunity came up at Cummings Electrical to get into IT. Turned out I liked it — and the deeper I got, the more it pulled me in. Systems, automation, infrastructure: it clicked in a way geology never quite did. I've been building on it ever since, moving from sysadmin to SRE to where I am now as a DevOps engineer.

I met my wife in Dallas, and we came down to Austin together to start our life here — dog included. When I'm not at a screen you'll find me at Zilker Park, on a golf course, or working through Austin's very long list of good restaurants. Texas wasn't exactly part of the plan, but Austin has a way of keeping people.

"If a human operator needs to touch your system during normal operations, you have a bug. The definition of normal changes as your systems grow."— Carla Geisser, Google SRE