From early infrastructure engineering through the rise of machine learning to the agentic AI frontier. 20 years on the road. The arc of a career told honestly.
20+
Years in Tech
48
States Driven
∞
Miles Logged
2026
Still Building
Career
Technology
Road
Life
2004
First Engineering Role
Infrastructure and systems work. The unglamorous foundation of everything that came after — learning how real systems fail, how they scale, and why simplicity is always the right answer.
InfrastructureSystems
2005
The Road Begins
First major road trip — the start of what would become 20 years of driving America. The country is different at 60mph with no itinerary. Lesson one: the destination is rarely the point.
Road TripUSA
2007
Cloud Infrastructure Era Begins
AWS launched S3 and EC2 the year before. Learning to build on cloud infrastructure when it was still considered experimental. The shift from physical servers to virtual everything was the first of many paradigm changes I'd ride.
AWSCloudEarly Adopter
2009
First Technical Leadership Role
Transition from individual contributor to leading a team. The hardest thing was learning that your job is no longer to write the best code — it's to create the conditions where others can. That realization took time.
LeadershipTeam Building
2010
Route 66 — Chicago to Los Angeles
The Mother Road end-to-end. From Grant Park in Chicago to Santa Monica Pier. Every intact stretch, every ghost town, every neon motel sign. The postwar American dream made of asphalt.
Route 66MidwestSouthwest
2012
Machine Learning Enters the Picture
AlexNet wins ImageNet by a margin that shocks the field. The deep learning era has arrived. I started reading everything — Goodfellow, Bengio, LeCun. The writing on the wall was clear: software was about to change fundamentally.
Machine LearningDeep LearningAlexNet
2014
Multi-Cloud Architecture Practice
Building systems that span AWS, GCP, and Azure simultaneously. The insight that drove the approach: enterprise clients should not be held hostage to any single vendor's pricing or availability. Platform-agnostic by principle, not accident.
GCPAWSAzureArchitecture
2015
The National Parks Circuit
Utah's Mighty Five in a single loop — Zion, Bryce, Capitol Reef, Canyonlands, Arches. Then north through Monument Valley to the Grand Canyon. The Southwest is another planet. The colors at dawn are not real.
UtahArizonaNational Parks
2017
Attention Is All You Need
The transformer paper drops. I read it the week it was published. The implications were not immediately obvious to everyone — but to anyone watching the field closely, the architecture felt like a threshold. Everything after this would be different.
TransformerNLPFoundational
2018
Full Pivot to AI/ML Engineering
Deliberate career transition. Left a comfortable infrastructure role to go deep on machine learning systems — model development, MLOps, deployment pipelines. The bet: AI would be the defining technology of the next decade. That bet has paid off.
AI/MLMLOpsCareer Pivot
2019
Pacific Northwest + Glacier
Olympic Peninsula's Hoh Rain Forest, then north to Glacier National Park. Going-to-the-Sun Road carved into the cliff face above turquoise lakes. The most dramatic road in America. Then Yellowstone's Lamar Valley at dawn — wolves, bison, the whole Pleistocene visible.
WashingtonMontanaGlacier NP
2020
The World Pauses
The pandemic year. Work from everywhere and nowhere. Ironically, the isolation accelerated AI research — remote collaboration, async tools, and the sudden demand for automation created a forcing function. GPT-3 dropped in June. The race was on.
GPT-3RemotePandemic
2022
The LLM Era Arrives
ChatGPT launches in November. 100 million users in 2 months. The technology is no longer a research curiosity — it's a product. The conversation with every client, every executive, every skeptic changes overnight. The architecture work begins in earnest.
ChatGPTLLMGenAI
2023
Chief Architect, AI Engineering
Leading AI/ML engineering at the intersection of technical depth and organizational strategy. Agentic AI architectures, LLM orchestration, intelligent tool-use patterns across every major cloud. The role I was building toward for a decade.
Chief ArchitectAgentic AI
2024
MCP + Agentic Healthcare AI
Model Context Protocol becomes the standard for tool integration. Building production agentic systems for healthcare RCM — prior authorization, claims adjudication, denial management. The hardest AI engineering problems are not technical. They are organizational and regulatory.
MCPHealthcare AILangGraphClaude
2025
48 States — Austin Base
Two decades of driving completes 48 states. Austin as home base — the right city for what comes next. Two states remain: Alaska and Hawaii. Target year: 2030. Some things are worth saving.
Blue Planet48 StatesAK+HI: 2030
2026 — NOW
The Agentic Frontier
Building the next generation of intelligent systems. The question is no longer whether AI can reason — it can. The question is how to deploy it safely, reliably, and at scale in the highest-stakes environments. That is the work.
Agentic AIHealthcareMulti-CloudPresent
2030 — TARGET
Alaska & Hawaii
Denali. The Aurora Borealis. Kilauea lava meeting the ocean at night. The two remaining states. Some completions deserve patience. The road always had this ending in mind.