Senior Software Engineer · Distributed Systems · AI Infrastructure · Geospatial
I kept vascular tissue alive in a research lab for two years. Now I keep ad operations alive at Adacavo. Inventory, maps, contracts, billing, the whole stack. I learned to code at a Starbucks in Madison, got my first dev job off Craigslist, and built a career wiring together TypeScript, Postgres, and LLMs. I ship side projects in AI, language learning, and geospatial tools because I can't seem to stop building things.
Biology (UW-Madison) → Research Lab → Software. A biologist, a Starbucks stranger, a Craigslist job, and a lot of late-night debugging.
Graduated from UW-Madison in biology and worked at the Morgridge Institute, where the goal was to keep vascular tissue alive outside the body long enough for organs to reach transplant patients. I learned systems thinking by debugging living systems. Turns out cells and microservices fail in surprisingly similar ways.
morgridge.org ↗
I was building a little health info website at a Starbucks when I noticed a guy with a GitHub sticker on his laptop. I introduced myself, said I was applying for developer jobs, and asked if he had any recommendations. He said: check Craigslist. Not what I expected, but okay.
I applied to a handful of dev postings on Craigslist. Which sounds sketchy, and maybe it was. A while later someone reached out to schedule an interview. Turned out to be the Starbucks guy's old boss. Small world, smaller ecosystem.
After the interview and a take home assignment, they hired me. I spent the next few years learning the actual craft. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, databases. Mostly by shipping things I didn't fully understand and then fixing them in production at 2am. The best way to learn, honestly.
Known weakness: too much espresso → bad sleep → more espresso to compensate → loop. I also take on too many things at once and then wonder why progress is slow. Working on it.
Books, music all day, making my own protein bars, testing new tools, sci fi and comedy, and staying active. The work doesn't work without the rest. And I've tested this theory extensively.
From a Craigslist dev job to running engineering at Adacavo. The path is crooked, but the pattern is clear.
A stranger at Starbucks saw my GitHub sticker and told me to check Craigslist. His old boss hired me. I spent the next year learning the real craft: HTML, CSS, JS, databases, and how to ship without breaking production.
Built across React, TypeScript, Node, Postgres, PostGIS, Python, AWS, and design. Got good at zero-to-one, and even better at debugging the things I broke at 2am.
Kept seeing the same problems in OOH, local business, and media ops. Stopped doing one-off sites and started building reusable systems. Some worked, some didn't. The patterns stuck.
Went all-in on Adacavo, a vertical SaaS platform for out-of-home advertising. Real customers, long sales cycles, messy data migrations, and the hardest product problems I've worked on yet.
Real products I've shipped — some bootstrapped, some sold, and a few still embarrassing me into improving.
The ops system for out-of-home advertising teams.
Eco-luxury resort investment site for Cape Verde.
Luxury resort and investment site for SeaScape Costa Rica.
Organic chemistry tools and supplies, without the clutter.
Search, compare, and book billboard space like you book a flight.
Quick phrase-based language learning for common real-world situations.
Health explainers you can read in five minutes.
Paste a URL, get a graded audit in under a minute.
A bedtime story for kids who are scared of the dark.
Local-first knowledge operating system for notes, decisions, and agent-readable context.
A modern systems language merging Erlang-style actors with Rust-grade types and AI agent support.
Turn your half-baked idea into a builder's brief. Architecture plans ready for AI agents.
AI development control plane. Tasks to branches to PRs to deployment-gated releases.
Where I'm actually pointing my time and attention.
Make Adacavo the system OOH operators actually want to use: CRM, inventory, billing, creative, and maps in one place.
Build or acquire a small portfolio of vertical products, each using AI to kill off a specific kind of repetitive work.
Keep extracting reusable map, data, and media building blocks from Adacavo so the next product starts with a map engine instead of a blank repo.
Use SaaS cash flow to buy real-world media inventory and property. Software prints cash; real assets compound it.
Five questions. One reason for being. A map of where your energy, skill, need, and pay intersect.
Your answers map a fingerprint across the four circles of ikigai.
Building something in OOH, SaaS, AI, or geospatial? Got a side project keeping you up at night? Send a note or grab a 30 min slot. I read every message. Especially the weird ones.
