About

I’m a senior full-stack & AI engineer with 25 years of experience in JavaScript and React, building web applications day to day at Pearson Learning Solutions. I’m comfortable across the stack — React, React Native, and TypeScript on the front end; Node.js, PostgreSQL, and MySQL on the back end; Docker (with Compose) to tie it together; and AWS and Google Cloud for deployment. I’m using Python for LLM tool calling and embeddings work. I’ve also spent several years working in Ruby on Rails.

Experience Link to heading

Pearson Learning Solutions — Senior React Developer · 2014–Present

Projects:

  • Live Response — React JS lead
  • FreeHand Grader — React JS lead
  • Learning Catalytics — Rails developer

Side Projects Link to heading

I recently built playcall, a natural-language NFL stats chatbot — ask a question in plain English and it answers from the nflverse play-by-play data in DuckDB, with every answer auditable. The source is on GitHub.

I also built Radio Stations Near Me, a React Native app backed by a Node.js API and a MySQL database, available on Google Play.

Speaking Link to heading

I’ve spoken at ReactDenver on “Building Android and iOS apps using React Native and Expo.”

AI & Tools Link to heading

Most of my recent work is hands-on AI engineering. Building playcall taught me how LLM tool calling actually works: the model runs a multi-turn agent loop — picking tools, writing SQL, reading results back, and self-correcting on errors. I implemented that loop across three providers (local Ollama, OpenAI, and Anthropic), streamed it to the React front end over server-sent events, and kept it honest with an eval suite of ground-truth test cases. My throughline for AI: don’t trust the model, trust the verifier.

I’ve worked with embeddings and vector databases — turning both text and images into vectors for semantic search and similarity.

Day to day, I use Claude and Codex, and run local LLMs with Ollama (qwen3-coder for code completion). I also work in Python — it’s been a great fit for AI and API work.

Cloud & Deployment Link to heading

I deploy and run full-stack apps in production on AWS and Google Cloud. I shipped fadethepublic.com to Google Cloud Run as two separate services — a static Next.js site served by Nginx and a FastAPI API — each containerized, mapped to its own custom domain, backed by Firestore, and set to scale to zero when idle. The full walkthrough is in Deploying a Full-Stack App to Google Cloud Run.

Education Link to heading

  • MBA, Finance — University of Texas, McCombs School of Business, 2006
  • B.S. Computer Science — University of Texas at Austin, 1998

When I’m Not Coding Link to heading

You can usually find me fly fishing, skiing, rolling at Jiu-Jitsu, or at the poker table.

Elsewhere Link to heading