I've considered a personal blog many times over the years. I'm going to give this a try. The site looks pretty crappy today, but I'll working a improving it.

A little about me. I live in Dallas, TX. I grew up in the Dallas area and went to school at Texas A&M. After graduating from A&M in 1998, I joined Southwest Airlines as a software engineer. My entire career has been in software development, but I have been increasingly less hands-on the last 10+ years. I have worked for Amazon Web Services for the last five years. I currently lead the Retail and CPG implementation organization for AWS Professional Services, a consulting organization within AWS.

I'm married to my high school sweetheart and we have two young adult sons finding their way in the world. We celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary last week.

My main hobbies are carpentry and software development. My wife and I have owned two homes since 2001. The first was a 1923 fixer upper in a nice neighborhood near downtown Dallas. For the last 14 years we've lived in a 1969 ranch style home in North Dallas. Across these two homes I've become a proficient carpenter and general home jack of all trades. I have the generally mentality that I can watch YouTube videos and figure out how to do most things myself. When we were 25yo, it was necessary to save money on our remodel. Over the last few years, my wife has convinced me we can afford to hire out most work.

I no longer write code professionally, so I do it as a hobby. It helps me stay connected to what my teams are working on, and affords me some level of credibility with the people I lead. On this blog I plan to document the process of staying technically relevant as an engineering manager approaching 50.

Don't over-analyze anything I write. I tend to ramble. These are my own thoughts.