I earned my Eagle Scout rank at seventeen. The project itself doesn't matter as much as what it taught me: if you want people to follow you, be the person who does the work, not the person who points at it. That stuck.
Later I did the St. Paul's School Advanced Studies Program, studying LISP and artificial intelligence. This was years before AI was a LinkedIn buzzword. I liked the idea that you could teach a machine to think through a problem. I didn't know I'd eventually be building SaaS products on top of the Claude API, but the thread was there.
In 2019, I thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail. 2,192 miles in 100 days. People ask why. The honest answer: I wanted to see if I could finish something that hard.
When you're 1,000 miles from the finish and your feet are bleeding and it's raining and you're out of food, you learn to break big problems into small steps. Mile by mile. It sounds like a motivational poster, but it's actually just math — you can walk 22 miles today, so you do, and then you do it again tomorrow.
I drove a trash truck during early COVID. Did physical labor. Whatever paid bills. Not glamorous, but no work is beneath me and every job teaches you something. Driving a truck teaches you routing and time management. Hauling trash teaches you that you really do want to learn Python.
I got hired at AutoVitals in August 2021 as a Customer Support Specialist. Within a year I was digging into SQL connectivity issues and writing PowerShell scripts because I was tired of running the same diagnostics by hand.
March 2024, promoted to Technical Support Specialist. I started building real tools — a Python suite on the Zendesk API, diagnostic toolsets, automation that handled bulk ticket processing during security incidents. The kind of work where you write code on Monday and it saves someone three hours on Tuesday.
January 2025, Team Lead. January 2026, Team Manager. Three promotions in three and a half years. Not because I play politics — because I kept building things that made the team better and eventually they ran out of reasons not to put me in charge.
Meanwhile I started shipping independent products. Content Curator — a full-stack SaaS app with React, Supabase, Stripe billing, and Claude AI. Real multi-tenant auth, real payment infrastructure, real users. The kind of product that proves you can build, not just maintain.
I'm not a manager who used to be technical. I'm a technical person who learned to lead. And I'm not done building.
When I write automation that cuts the team's workload by 40%, it's because repetitive work is soul-crushing and people should spend their time on problems worth solving. When I document solutions, I'm making sure the next person doesn't start from zero. When I ship a product on my own time, it's because I want to prove I can do the whole thing — not just one piece of it.
I'm looking for a place where technical depth is rewarded, managers still write code, and building things that work matters more than talking about building things that work.