My README
- My wife is Australian and I consider Melbourne my second home. Collingwood Football Club is my favorite sports team.
- I have 2 children. Geneviette was born in 2005 and is 16 years old and Rónán was just born on October 1st 2021. And yes, it is super weird having a newborn after 16 years.
- I’m a 10 year veteran of the U.S. Army. I was a Signals Intelligence Analyst and Cryptologic Linguist specializing in the Korean language and the North Korean military.
- I worked for the NSA as a Korean Linguist and built software tools to help my department work more efficiently. After building a few tools that helped the department, I was recruited onto a software development team and helped introduce database driven web applications to the NSA.
- I’m professionally fluent in Korean and I’m functionally proficient in French and Italian. I can also speak some Russian, Spanish, and a few other languages. I’m also passable in English.
- I grew up in technology and coding since middle school, but always planned on being a linguist or history professor. Coding felt easy to me, so as a career, felt like I wouldn’t be challenging myself.
- I may have started my development career in the biggest of enterprises, the U.S. government, but I grew up in startups. I’m a veteran of 7 startups including RichContext. 3 of those startups I was the first employee.
- I believe leaders should be umbrellas over their team, but that they’re too often funnels. A leader should never funnel pressure and fear down to their team, but self-centered leadership often ends this way.
- Nothing is more important than taking care of those under your charge. Nothing is more important than taking care of your team. Nothing is more important than taking care of everyone other than your self.
- I’m passionate and opinionated. I’m constantly trying to be more reserved and not make too many waves. It’s a constant struggle for me and I’m not always successful.
- You can ask people to do things until you are blue in the face, but the only way to truly effect change is to lead by example.
- I’ll never ask you to do something that I would not do myself. Ever.
- I am a sensitive person. I’m in a constant struggle to maintain a steady and unemotional visage.
- I do not believe in the mantra of “We are just coworkers. We do not need to be friends.” I spend more time with all of you than I do my own family. I believe that if we hope for any level of productive efficiency, we have to enjoy being together.
- I’ve watched the Holiday and Bridget Jones Diary more times than I’d like to admit.
- I read everything. Every email. Every notification. Every slack message. I will not miss something you say or something you need.
- I cry more than I’d probably like to admit, but I can endure more than many can.
- You don’t need to earn trust from me. I lead with trust first, and I adjust when I learn I trusted more than I should have. But you will always have my trust until you prove that I shouldn’t.
- The most important thing I can do is enable everyone under to be successful. My success is not personal acknowledgment and achievement. My success is the achievement and acknowledgement of those I lead. If they are all successful and I am invisible, I have done my job.
- I live and die by transparency. Not the usual valley startup lip service of transparency, but true and unfiltered transparency even when its hard.
- I have a guilty pleasure for musicals. My favorite is either Rent or Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
- I don’t require excellence, but I do require the desire and constant effort to be excellent.
- I strongly believe in and try to promote inclusivity at all costs.
- Nothing gets under my skin more than unnecessary misdirection and obfuscation. Fear of reaction too often drives avoidance of the raw truth.
- Truth first, and truth above all else. Truth is not always easy. Truth does not always feel good. I believe if you trust people to handle the truth they will often handle it better than you anticipated.
- World travel is one of my passions, and I deeply envy people who can live out of a backpack and have few tethers to a single location. Nothing expands our minds more than experiencing other cultures and traveling.
- I keep my promises. Always.
- I hated every day I was in the Army, but looking back on it, I learned so many lessons that formed what I now believe a leader should be.
- Loyalty is everything.
- I have jumped out of planes and helicopters.
- I have no fears and nothing shakes me. Other than one thing: disappointing someone who depends on me.
- Nothing that is worthwhile is easy. Struggle is the crucible that forges greatness.
- When you need me, I will be there.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the greatest TV show ever made.
Patents
Systems, devices, and methods for presenting customized content through web API
US 11,010,447 B1
Abstract: The solutions provide a distributed computing architecture and system for HTTP message exchange and modification. An HTTP request for information may be pre-processed by a first server to detect the geographic location information of the requester and add such geographic information into the request. The modified request is further processed by a second server to identify rules associated with each type of geographic location information included in the request and to add such rule information as associated with the geographic location information into the request. The further modified request is then processed by a third server to determine the geographic location information, retrieve the rule information, and map and obtain a content customized for the request based on the geographic location information and the rule information.
Certifications
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect
- AWS Certified Developer
- Amateur Radio Technician License
- Amateur Radio General License
