Houston, Texas
I have spent fifteen years in production software, as an engineer and as a manager. I founded Atelier Actara, which runs fashion shows, and I am its principal engineer. I have photographed fashion under the name Outside the Obvious since 2018, and I crew Elissa, the 1877 barque that sails out of Galveston.
01 · Work
I build with Elixir and Phoenix on the back end, React and TypeScript on the front, and Postgres underneath, and I ship native iOS and Android when the product needs them. I have managed engineers at Chess.com, Invisible Technologies, and Amplify, built a QA function from nothing, and owned a product roadmap. I still write the schema and the GraphQL myself.
I photograph fashion shows from backstage and publish the work as Outside the Obvious. I have shot New York Fashion Week and Houston since 2018, more than ninety runway shows in all, and published three photo books. Some of it I shoot on film and develop by hand.
I am volunteer crew aboard Elissa, a three-masted iron barque built in 1877 that the Galveston Historical Foundation keeps sailing. We do day sails in the Gulf, and in June 2026 we took her up the Atlantic coast to New York, which I wrote up daily at onlytallships.com.
02 · Experience
Engineers have reported to me at Chess.com, Invisible Technologies, and Amplify Life Insurance. Before that I built energy and industrial software in Houston at Landdox, Quorum, and BSD Consulting. The résumé has the full version.
Atelier Actara runs fashion shows: casting, lineup, venues, guest lists, and check-in. I designed and built the whole system as its only engineer, including the multi-tenant permission model that lets agencies, brands, and venues work the same show without seeing each other's data. I made AI-assisted development the documented standard, with written engineering conventions, agent skill definitions, and automated verification gates that run before a change ships. I also set the pricing, wrote the financial plan, and designed the brand and design system the product ships with.
I managed three engineers and owned the new-user experience roadmap, sequencing work across product and engineering and holding the release plan for it. I led the onboarding and Connect work streams, which shipped changes to millions of players. I wrote the specs engineers built from, and added the onboarding and activation metrics the team uses to judge funnel changes.
Invisible is an AI services company that delivers to OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. I managed two engineering teams in parallel, with four engineers reporting to me, and owned delivery, hiring, and performance for both. I built the QA function from nothing, with testing standards, documentation, and an automated suite that took coverage from zero to 85 percent. I ran technical hiring, promoted engineers from inside the company, and wrote core product code.
Under this name I build APIs and full applications for clients. Atelier Actara started here in December 2022.
Amplify was standing up its first engineering team and software stack when I joined. I managed three engineers and ran sprint planning, scoping, and retrospectives. I replaced the legacy stack with a company-wide Elixir API server and Postgres database, with continuous integration and tests from the first commit, built the React and Redux front ends against it, and defined the code review policy the team used.
I shipped core Elixir for an early-stage startup and introduced retrospectives, documentation, and project planning. I built a CSV importer that handled arbitrary client file formats.
Quorum makes enterprise software for the energy industry and bought Landdox in 2020. I integrated the Landdox product into their much larger legacy codebase.
Landdox made land management software for oil and gas. I planned and led the major features: mapping, bulk data import, and a system that generated payment checks. I interviewed and hired engineers, and joined sales calls to answer technical questions. I worked across Elixir, Node, Angular, React, AWS, and Terraform.
At BSD Consulting I was the only engineer on a web platform for pipeline data, server and client, from prototype through delivery. Before that I was a research assistant at the Conrad Blucher Institute, where I built mobile mapping applications for land surveying with survey-grade GPS and RTK field collection, funded in part by NOAA. I interned at Esri, writing geoprocessing scripts for disaster response, and at Shell, writing Python automation for spatial data pipelines and raster generation from raw sonar, which included seven days at sea on a hydrographic survey.
03 · Atelier Actara
Atelier Actara manages fashion shows: it casts models, books photographers and crew, runs the lineup and the venue, and handles guest lists and check-in. Agencies, brands, and venues work the same show without seeing each other's data. I made the first commit in December 2022 and it became its own company in June 2026.
Atelier Actara grew out of Applied Generics, the practice I have run since June 2022 alongside full-time roles, building APIs and full applications for clients. The same shop produced Exchangr, The List, and AGUA.
04 · At sea
Elissa is a three-masted iron barque built in Aberdeen in 1877 and sailed today by volunteer crew out of Galveston. I stand watches, work aloft, and handle sail on day sails in the Gulf. In June 2026 she sailed from the Gulf up the Atlantic coast to New York and I was aboard.
I wrote the ship's log for that passage underway and published it at onlytallships.com, laid out like a nineteenth-century periodical. It is built with Astro and has a Leaflet chart of every geotagged entry, an RSS feed, a guestbook, and a small browser-based editor for writing entries from a bunk with poor signal.
My first week at sea was a hydrographic survey during a Shell internship in 2013, where I generated rasters from raw sonar for a geomatics degree.
05 · Photography
I photograph fashion shows from backstage and life aboard tall ships. Most of the runway work is the hour before the doors open: fittings, makeup, last alterations, and models waiting in clothes they cannot sit down in. I have shot at New York Fashion Week and in Houston since 2018, across more than ninety runway shows.
These are made backstage at runway shows. Because I also produce shows through Atelier Actara, I take them from inside the work.
These are made aboard Elissa, on day sails out of Galveston and on the 2026 passage to New York. Some of it is on film, which I develop by hand weeks after it happened.
This small series runs through both bodies of work: hands pinning a hem, and hands on a line in the dark.
I have published three photo books: A Poem of Lima, Midnight at Main, and Mis. I sell prints of selected photographs through the print room on the site.
I shoot with a Leica M3, a Leica X2, a Ricoh GR III, and an Olympus OM-D E-M1X.
06 · Projects
2023 to 2026 · JavaScript · three.js
Rod Tips Only puts five fishing rods on a dock in Louisiana and waits for a bite. I model each rod as a tapered cantilever beam, a chain of rigid links joined by torsion springs and solved with XPBD, so a redfish bends it the way a redfish would. It runs as a PWA and has a replay system, catch cards, and a depression meter.
2026 · Astro · TypeScript
OnlyTallShips is the ship's log from Elissa's Atlantic passage. I built it on Astro content collections with Zod schemas and added a Leaflet voyage map, RSS, Giscus comments, and a Markdown editor with a location picker and a photo drop zone.
2022 to 2026 · React
This is the photography site. It has galleries, a print room backed by Pixieset, and a vCard download for people I meet in person, and it deploys to GitHub Pages through Actions.
2026 · GDScript · Godot 4
Hurricane Pinball is a 2D pinball game I wrote in Godot 4. It has a physics ball, flippers, bumpers, three balls per game, a title screen, and a news overlay.
2022 · Elixir
Burritinator is a small Phoenix umbrella that splits API, GraphQL, domain, and database into separate apps and keeps commands apart from queries. Atelier Actara uses the same layout at a larger scale.
2026 · Kotlin
The Android client serves models, crew, and media. I built it with Jetpack Compose and Apollo Kotlin against the same GraphQL schema as the web and iOS apps, with Hilt for dependency injection.
2012 to 2017 · JavaScript · GIS
In my GIS years I built an adventure game on ArcGIS Server, wrote a JavaScript library for adventure-game dialog called yadda, contributed to Leaflet.Editable, and published DeviationDetective, an npm package that takes two GeoJSON lines and returns where they differ.
Ongoing · Dotfiles
I type on a Corne split keyboard running ZMK firmware with my own keymap, and I keep my Sway, i3, and Vim configs in public dotfiles.
This list comes from the GitHub API when the page loads, most recently pushed first.
07 · Timeline
08 · Contact
Write to me about engineering and leadership roles, consulting, show production, photography commissions, exhibitions, or prints. I am based in Houston and work remotely.
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