About

My dad made the switch to Linux before I was old enough use them, so that's all I grew up on. I loved the terminal, Bash, and figuring out how computers work. I taught myself C and Python, built a small Breakout game for the Nintendo 3DS, and worked through Linux From Scratch in high school (also cross-compiling for a Raspberry Pi). Compiling kernels, configuring systems, and breaking the machine badly enough to reinstall it a few times taught me quite a bit.

My parents were missionaries, so we lived in Mexico for a stretch, and I was homeschooled K–12. I later studied mechanical engineering at the University of New Mexico and went into research and development for the DOE/DoD. At Sandia National Laboratories, I led mechanical design and analysis for hypersonic and embedded systems, served as principal investigator on interdisciplinary research, and managed a yearly project portfolio of over a million dollars. The work brought together the parts of engineering I enjoyed most: difficult problems, applied math, experimentation, analysis, and plenty of code to process and make sense of the results.

When I started looking for something new, software jobs kept appearing while mechanical roles did not. Programming had always been part of what I did, so the move felt less like starting over and more like finally making it the main thing. I joined Eagle Metal Products without knowing Laravel and learned it quickly; today I am a technical lead for the team building the ERP that runs the plant. I help set technical direction, lead design and code reviews, mentor engineers, work through problems with stakeholders, and serve as the primary owner of production releases.

PHP and Laravel pay the bills, but much of my free time goes into open source. Most of my own projects live developer tooling and packages, including phpstan-laravel, larastan-livewire, and laravel-sql-entities. I also maintain the PHP and Blade tree-sitter grammars and their Neovim queries, and contribute to PHPantom, a PHP language server written in Rust. Beyond those projects, I've landed patches in Git itself, Jujutsu, GitLab, Neovim, and the broader PHP ecosystem.

Away from the keyboard, most of my time goes to my family and church. I also train Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, play disc golf, solve Rubik's cubes, and occasionally remember how to throw a yo-yo.