§ 00 — The Place
Spanish Fork, Utah.
Wasatch Front · 4,900 ft
Spanish Fork Valley — looking north toward the Wasatch Front
Software engineer on the identity team at a large genealogy platform. Builder of tools, investor in homes that hold their character. Husband, father of two, occasional finisher of basements.
My career has lived in the parts of software that aren't supposed to fail. Authentication. Authorization. The places where one quiet bug becomes a security incident, and one good design holds for a decade. I've spent years thinking about JWT validation, session management at scale, permission set hashing, and the small, careful shape of a token that nobody should ever have to think about.
Outside the office, the same instinct shows up in different materials. I buy houses, mostly older ones, mostly with something wrong, and I work on them — sometimes with a contractor, often with my own hands. Five rentals across the Wasatch Front, a few sold and reinvested, one current home on three-quarters of an acre that backs onto a golf course. None of it glamorous. All of it mine.
This site is a quiet record of both halves: the work I'm proud to point at, the writing I keep up between meetings, and a smaller, gated room behind it for the projects and notes that aren't for everyone.
A lightweight pair of slash-commands — one to compress a coding session into a portable handoff, one to resume from it cleanly. Designed for team handoffs and long-running work, in production with a small team of engineers.
→A paper-trading system where a language model proposes structured trades and a hard-coded risk manager has the only veto. Logged, journaled, ntfy-notified. The architecture matters more than the alpha.
→An internal Claude Code plugin that reads Elastic Beanstalk configurations across eight categories — autoscaling, security posture, logging, JWT overhead, thundering-herd traps — and reports back in plain English. Built for my team, sharing as a plugin pattern.
→Five rentals across Saratoga Springs, South Jordan, Millcreek, and Highland — bought, held, and (where it makes sense) sold. Some were taken to the studs. Some only needed a paint color chosen well. A working spreadsheet of returns lives in the studio.
→Taught to engineers across teams over Microsoft Teams. Slash commands, skills, hooks, MCP servers, plugins — in that order. Each day a small, real example. Most of it built from things I'd already shipped.
→The good buildings, like the good systems, are the ones nobody has to think about.— A working principle
Authentication and load-bearing walls have more in common than they should. A short note on the discipline of work that disappears when it works.
A working developer's case for boring markdown. What I gave up, and what I got back: my Saturdays, mostly.
A note for friends who keep asking me what the short-term-rental tax loophole actually is, written without the salesmanship.