Titanium, Bubbles, and Heat Loops: Engineering the Ideal Aquatic Habitat
Engineering with Life in Mind As an engineer, I’ve always been drawn to systems — things that run cleanly, correct themselves, and gracefully handle change. But nothing has challenged my systems thinking quite like building a sustainable indoor shrimp farm. Raising aquatic life indoors isn’t just about keeping tanks full — it’s about engineering resilient […]
Fishing for Signals: Observability in Complex Cloud Systems
Learning to Read the Water (and the Logs) I’ve been fishing since I was a kid. Long days on lakes and rivers taught me to slow down, watch for movement, and notice the subtle signals that tell you where the fish are — a swirl, a flick, a change in current. Years later, I realized […]
Fishing the Feedback Loop: How Nature Informs Systems Thinking in Tech
Casting Lines and Connecting Dots I grew up fishing the lakes and rivers of Minnesota. As a kid, I didn’t think of it as anything special — it was just something we did. But over the years, as my career in tech evolved — from platform engineering at Target and Icario to launching my own […]
Volunteering with Impact: How Engineers Can Support Aging-in-Place Initiatives
Where Tech Meets Real Life I’ve spent over a decade building digital systems—Kubernetes clusters, CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure, ML deployment frameworks. But some of the most meaningful work I’ve done recently didn’t happen in a datacenter or a terminal window. It happened in the yard of a senior citizen’s home, raking leaves and clearing gutters. […]