Engineer first, with a security habit I never grew out of.

I studied Cyber Security Analytics and Operations at Penn State, which sounds like a policy degree and was in practice a lot of packet captures, malware samples, and arguments about whether a control was actually a control. I came in already writing software and left knowing how to break it, which is a useful pairing.

Since then I've been a software engineer at a healthcare company — five years on the same product, which is long enough to watch decisions age. Most of my work is backend: Elixir and Ruby on Rails, Postgres underneath, and the unglamorous plumbing that keeps patient data moving between systems that were not designed to talk to each other.

Healthcare is a good place to care about correctness. The failure modes are not hypothetical, the data is genuinely sensitive, and nobody gets to declare a maintenance window because a clinic is open. That constraint shaped how I build: small blast radii, honest error handling, and systems that degrade instead of disappearing.