Raised on the coast. Film school. A decade in NYC. Now I build AI systems that run while I sleep.

I grew up in a coastal home in St. Augustine Beach, Florida—Atlantic Ocean literally in my backyard. Coquina everywhere: the retaining walls around my yard, Castillo de San Marcos a few miles off the island. Coquina is soft when you pull it from the ground and hardens as it weathers—a wall built from it has stood since the 1600s. I didn't think about any of that then. I think about it constantly now.

Went to Full Sail for film school. Moved to New York and got into VFX—compositing Budweiser Super Bowl spots, Coca-Cola, Hershey's, Sprite. One night on the subway, someone next to me was holding something I'd never seen before. I asked him what it was. It was the first iPhone. I jumped instantly—left the VFX industry around the time it launched and never looked back. The screen in that stranger's hand was where everything was about to happen, and I wanted to build for it.

I spent the next fifteen years designing products—not at one place, but across studios and startups. It started at Fuzz Productions, shipping native mobile apps for Disney, Wegmans, AB InBev, Shake Shack, Forever 21, Belk, and The Met, where I mentored a dozen designers and built a mobile design system that ran across ten-plus projects. From there it was a run of UX/UI work: freelance systems across industries, the Orlando Magic app at Teeps, a secure end-to-end-encrypted messaging app at sndr, a responsive redesign at ISGF, and corporate rebrands at Cloud Nerd. Different clients, different stacks, same instinct—make the thing clear, make it ship, make it last.

Then the work changed shape. I moved from designing screens to running the programs that delivered them. At Cloud Nerd I became a delivery team lead, shipping eight Salesforce projects on time and under budget, each one $500K to $1.2M. At AArete I led a six-person UX team redesigning a national healthcare platform—+45% engagement—while managing a $2.5M Salesforce implementation across multiple states and orchestrating a multi-state insurance-portal Go Live with a zero-error launch. Then Ascend, where I served as Senior Technical Project Manager on NYSUT's enterprise membership and web modernization, running Agile delivery across engineering, design, and DevOps with budgets up to $3M. Same builder, bigger surface area: roadmaps, sprint boards, vendor integration, executive briefings, the calls that decide whether a thing actually ships.

Children and family brought me home. Back to the coast, back to the salt air. And then AI hit the same way the iPhone did on that subway—same jolt, same certainty that this was where the next decade of building lived. I went all-in the same way I did the first time.

Now I build infrastructure that runs while I sleep. Coquina—named after the material I grew up around—is a self-healing memory platform with dual-path search and self-evolving subsystems; it's live with 2,000+ memories and 48,000+ auto-linked relationship edges and counting. Forge is the agent runtime I built to orchestrate it—roughly 43 autonomous workers running a 25-step overnight chain on Apple Silicon, zero cloud. I designed, built, and operate all of it. Recently I turned it loose on itself: a 105-agent read-only self-audit, adversarially verified, that surfaced 165 findings I triaged onto a remediation board.

That's the arc—designer, then program leader, now AI builder. Three different jobs, one throughline: own the spec and ship the system behind it. Alongside Grain Studios I still take on contract product design and frontend work—most recently the MXPP platform through Opserate and Cloud Club's consultant-matching product.

I go hard. Every day. The work is about building things that last—resilient systems, clear thinking, no shortcuts. Coquina, after all.