About
Right when it counts. Wrong where it’s cheap.
Thirteen years in networking, then enterprise cloud architecture, and now co-founding a company aimed at what healthcare actually costs. The part that carried across wasn’t the technical knowledge.
Analytics is a humbling profession. You walk in certain, and the evidence corrects you in front of everybody.
It was the method. Twenty years of asking one question of steadily larger systems: a factory floor in East Peoria, then a global enterprise network, then one percent of the world’s daily meals, now the price of American healthcare. What is this actually doing?
The scale changed everything except the discipline. Draw the real thing before you commit to it. Get closer to the evidence than is comfortable. Check the gaps nobody owns. Watch where you want to finish, not what is right in front of you. I called it Actual State once I noticed I was running the same four moves on packets, on teams, and on an industry.
Most decisions are reversible, and those are worth making fast and being wrong about cheaply. The few that are not reversible are what the width is for.
The path
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Now
Co-founder & CTO, Cowboy Christian
A health cost sharing platform built around faith and helping people live healthier and financially free, and where most of my time goes now. My co-founder is a cardiothoracic surgeon; I lead the technical side. The largest system I have tried to read, and the one where declared and actual are furthest apart.
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May 2022 – present
Founder, Sereno Tech
Cloud, AI, and automation, mostly for small businesses and solopreneurs, for whom a wrong technology decision is not survivable. That is where the work has come from rather than a limit on it; the method does not change with the size of the company. Owning it changed the job: a consultant is accountable for the diagnosis, an owner for whether the thing worked.
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Sep 2020 – May 2026
Senior Solutions Architect, AWS
Lead Solutions Architect on McDonald's for five years, covering architecture, security, networking and resiliency across one of the largest retail technology estates in the world. Multi-region disaster recovery, the mobile application, global supply chain. Mentored SAs, wrote exam questions for the Advanced Networking Specialty, and published on the AWS networking and industries blogs.
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Jun 2007 – Sep 2020
Caterpillar
Thirteen years in East Peoria, from a factory floor to global infrastructure without leaving the company. Each role was the same question asked of a larger system.
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May 2018 – Sep 2020
AWS Cloud Architect
Three and a half years on Caterpillar's AWS team before joining AWS itself. Designed the global cross-account core: Direct Connect, VPCs, Route 53. The first time the network I owned ran on somebody else's hardware.
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Mar 2013 – May 2018
Network Performance Analyst
Packet analysis, netflow, monitoring and incident response across the global enterprise, plus the diplomacy of explaining findings to everyone from plant floor to executive. Led network performance for Command for Dozing: an operator in Málaga driving a D11 bulldozer 5,000 miles away in Arizona, live.
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Nov 2010 – Feb 2013
Network Administrator
Data centre connectivity and global LAN support. Brought an acquired site onto the Caterpillar network. Earned the CCNA here.
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Jun 2007 – Oct 2010
IT Analyst
Site administrator for 1,500 people across office and factory: desktops through servers, token ring through shop-floor equipment. Automated assembly lines for workflow and ergonomics, and worked with vendors closely enough that new wireless torque tools reached the market.
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Education
Olivet Nazarene University
Where the technical training and the conviction that the work is for somebody stopped being separate subjects.
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Jun 2013 – May 2016
Piano instructor, Greenehouse School of the Arts
Beginning to intermediate piano, K–12, three years of evenings. Teaching a nine-year-old to read music is the same problem as teaching an organization to read its own telemetry.
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2017 – present
Writing it down
Seventy-odd posts on diagnosis, architecture, and the occasional lesson learned behind a lawn mower. The archive is the receipt for this page.
The detailed role history lives on LinkedIn, which is more current than any page I’d maintain by hand.
Published
Work with my name on it.
Writing and reference architecture published by AWS, out of the networking and retail work. The firewall piece is the one I’d hand to another engineer first: two services that both filter on domain names and had no way to agree on the list.
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AWS Guidance
Author
Guidance for Restaurant Menu Maintenance on AWS
Propagating menu, price and availability changes across web, mobile and in-store in near real time. The problem underneath every wrong price on a drive-through board.
AWS Solutions Library
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March 2023
Lead author, with Steve Bruggeman
Centralizing domain list management for AWS Network Firewall and Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall
One domain list enforced at two layers: a CloudFormation stack keeping Network Firewall and Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall in sync from a single file.
AWS Networking & Content Delivery Blog
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July 2023
Co-author
How to network your smart store to AWS
Thousands of physical stores onto one cloud backbone with Cloud WAN and Direct Connect, under centralized security policy.
AWS Industries Blog
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AWS Docs
Contributor
Tutorial: Create an IPAM and pools using the console
The getting-started path for IP Address Manager: delegated administration, pool hierarchies, allocation rules.
AWS VPC IPAM Documentation
Credentials
Receipts, with expiry dates.
Certifications are a floor, not a ceiling. But a page arguing that you should go and check cannot list a lapsed credential as though it still holds, so these are split by what is actually current, as of August 2026.
Current
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AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Professional
Through Sep 2028
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AWS Certified AI Practitioner
Foundational
Through Oct 2028
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AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Foundational
Through Sep 2028
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AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
Associate
Through May 2027
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Claude Certified Architect
Associate · Anthropic
Through Oct 2026
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Hurricane Electric IPv6
Sage, the top tier
No expiry
AWS Subject Matter Expert · through 2023
Wrote exam questions for the Advanced Networking Specialty certification, which I also held. Writing a good question is harder than answering one: every wrong answer has to be plausible to somebody who half knows the material.
Held and lapsed
- AWS Advanced Networking · Specialty · to Dec 2025
- AWS Security · Specialty · to May 2025
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect · Associate · to Nov 2024
- AWS Certified Developer · Associate · to Aug 2024
- Wireshark Certified Network Analyst · WCNA · to Feb 2023
- Cisco Certified Network Associate · CCNA · to Jun 2016
The lapsed ones are here because the sequence is the story: CCNA out of a Caterpillar data centre in 2013, packet analysis certified in the middle years, the AWS specialties during the architecture years, and an AI practitioner credential and an Anthropic architect certification in the ones I’m in now. I let the associates expire when the professional superseded them.
Asana Solutions Partner · since April 2024
- Artificial Intelligence & Automation
- Cloud Architecture (AWS)
- Enterprise Networking
- Technology Strategy
- Entrepreneurship & Startups
- Business Transformation
- Solution Architecture
- Healthcare
What decides the work
Faith isn’t the part that happens after work.
It’s in the company name because it’s upstream of the company.
My mission has always been to improve lives by solving problems. The smile I earn from a customer is the hardest thing to get and the reason I keep going after it.
I build at the intersection of AI, cloud, entrepreneurship, and faith. Faith is last because it is the one the other three answer to: it decides what I am willing to build, and who for. A system that can bankrupt a family for getting sick is a moral problem before an economic one.
The verse that has followed me longest is a craftsman’s one:
“Do you see a man skillful in his work? He will stand before kings; he will not stand before obscure men.” Proverbs 22:29 ESV
The cleanest statement I know of the thing I actually believe: do the work well enough that it speaks before you do.
Off the clock
The rest of it.
Husband and father, including twins, who are responsible for half of what I understand about resilience under load. I play keys and record the occasional song. Peoria, Illinois.