Resume

I've been in tech for 30+ years across development, infrastructure, and operations — including 15 years at Principal Financial Group in network, systems, and application roles — and the last 12 building and running Ruby on Rails applications in insurance (surety).

I'm a Consulting Application Developer at Merchants Bonding Company. Recently I've architected AI-powered intake for claims and new business: extracting key details from emails and web forms and automating record creation for underwriters. I also own our infrastructure as code (OpenTofu, AWS RDS, Cloudflare WAF), CI/CD on GitHub Actions, and our annual third-party security review.

I still build and mend features in Ruby with Rails, and keep JavaScript minimal — Hotwire/Stimulus when I need it. I build with AI coding agents (Claude Code) every day: I direct the work, review everything, and use them to learn new tools faster. You probably can't see much of my work since they are private repos, but check out my Social profiles if you want to take a look.

Past language explorations include Elixir, Haskell, Elm, and Scala.

If you want to see more detail, check out my Social profiles.

• Functional Programming (or mostly)
  • - I've done procedural and OOP; FP concepts genuinely appeal to me
  • - You can FP in almost any language — I enjoy applying those ideas even in Ruby
  • - Elixir remains a favorite; I find myself drawn to languages that make you think differently
• "Back-endy"
  • - I like messing with browsers, CSS, and hacky JavaScript less and less as the years go by
  • - I enjoy more things farther away from the front-end, I think.
  • - Related to the above, working in some other non-web app arena would be fresh and fun, I suspect
  • - This could be "dev-opsy", or "developer-toolsy", but the details will matter, I guess.
• People
  • - People that are open to new ideas and thoughts.
  • - It is important to be listened to and to feel that way. No matter if we agree or not.
  • - People that actually want to help each other
  • - I'd like to feel like I'm on a team and not just taking up space in the same building.
• Remote
  • - Remote-first is the preference; open to hybrid if the team and role are the right fit