About
I spent five years in the Marine Corps at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, leading the second-largest Marine Corps disbursing office: 157 Marines and 12 civilians across seven finance functions, serving 60,000-plus personnel across the eastern United States and Europe. On a seven-month, ten-nation deployment aboard three naval vessels supporting a 3,000-person Marine Expeditionary Unit, I managed a $350,000 cash budget with zero discrepancies.
After the Marine Corps I went back for an MBA at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business, finishing in 2026. The operations discipline from the disbursing office carried over almost unchanged: audit trails, zero-discrepancy budgets, and process that holds up under someone else checking your work. The domain didn’t carry over at all — I moved toward data and AI engineering on purpose, betting that the same discipline applied to software would be more useful there than it is in finance.
That bet is most of what I’ve built since. Two systems built in employment are worth their own section below; the rest is a personal stack — the full catalog is on this site — built the same way: compiled, tested, and CI-verified before I call anything done. Ardent Tools is where that half lives in public: the systems, the recordings, and the receipts for what each one actually does today.
Built in employment
Two systems I’m proud of belong to my employer; they appear here as experience, not inventory.
The first: a 145,000-line Rust platform with a 137-tool MCP agent surface over a healthcare-analytics data warehouse, gated by a machine-enforced standards layer of 13 rule registries and 284 rules with a verified zero-override record (measured 2026-07-16, tool count triple-confirmed against independent sources).
The second: a medical-code taxonomy engine, solo-built in an eight-day intensive sprint in March 2026 after upstream research and planning — a from-scratch Rust embedding pipeline over 301,000 medical codes, fine-tuned on 1.35 million training pairs, landing 97.5% cluster purity (measured against the shipped model).
Ardent Tools shares its name with Ardent Leatherworks, small-batch leather goods built under the motto “the hand remembers what the mind tries to forget.” Different material, same conviction: attention is the actual work.