Technologist, engineer, educator, and a few other things.
I’ve spent my career at the intersection of humans and technology, trying to answer one question: why do we keep making people conform to systems instead of building systems that work for people?
That question has taken me through cognitive psychology and systems engineering at Georgia Tech, stage combat choreography with the Society of American Fight Directors, medieval manuscript studies, set design for theatre, and a long career in enterprise automation and AI product management. The common thread isn’t obvious at first glance. That’s what makes it valuable.
I call it a tapestry. Each discipline adds a thread, and the threads reinforce each other in ways a single strand never could. Designing a fight scene and designing a document processing workflow both demand the same thing: understanding how humans move through a system, where they stumble, and how to make the next step obvious. My arts background didn’t happen before my technology career. It shaped it.
Where others see unrelated experience, I see interconnected systems. I tease order out of chaos. That’s the skill, and it comes from having enough threads to recognize and anticipate the whole pattern.
I’m also the person who pays attention to how a film score builds tension, how a cinematographer frames a shot to guide your eye, and how science fiction has been quietly predicting the ethical dilemmas we’re only now facing with AI. The arts teach you to see what’s happening beneath the surface. That translates directly to product work.
Today I work as a Senior Technical Product Manager specializing in Intelligent Document Processing and AI-driven automation. I help organizations stop wasting their smartest people on repetitive tasks and start putting them where they belong: guiding decisions, steering strategy, and applying the judgment that no algorithm should be trusted to handle alone. Technology should make the complex simpler. Humans should be the ones watching the machinery, catching the errors, and charting the course.
I operate from Columbus, Ohio through Gray Minds LLC, where I also build tools and workflows for my own use, because the best way to understand automation is to live it.
People are not components in a machine. When someone spends more time fighting a badly implemented system than doing their actual work, that’s a design failure, not a training problem.
Good technology is invisible. It removes friction, preserves human judgment, and gives people back the hours they were never supposed to lose.
The most effective technologists I know draw from more than one discipline. The best solutions come from people who can think in systems, read a room, and tell a story.
I’m working on a personal infrastructure that puts me in control of my own tools and workflows. That means a local-first knowledge management system in Obsidian, terminal-based AI interactions through Claude Code, and self-hosted solutions that reduce dependency on cloud platforms. More on these soon.
Technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It lands on real people with real constraints, and the gaps between design intent and lived experience are where the damage happens. A few that I think about:
Security models that forget about families. Two-factor authentication assumes every user is an independent adult with a smartphone. It doesn’t account for elderly parents you’re trying to protect from scams, where you need a responsible family member in the loop without surrendering their phone number. The security model is built for individuals, but risk is a family problem.
The subscription trap. When everything is a recurring cost, your digital life becomes a liability that scales with time, not income. Photos, documents, email, storage; all of it evaporates if you miss a payment or outlive your earning years. Retirees on fixed income will be the first to feel it. Then acquisitions will erase what’s left when a service gets absorbed or shut down. We are building a generation of digital loss into the system and no one is talking about it.
I am a lot of things. Each of these is a thread in the tapestry, and I’m building out pages for all of them over time. Some are professional. Some are personal. The distinction matters less than you’d think.
Technologist · Engineer · Stage Combatant · Theatre Designer · Medievalist · Family Archivist · Photographer · Drone Operator · Cinephile · Cat Dad · Family