About the work.

I work at the intersection of judgment, systems, and accountability.

My career began in journalism—in high school and college—where accuracy mattered because mistakes landed in print and people responded to them. That led to public-sector communications, serving as a spokesman for two governors and multiple school district superintendents, where words were never theoretical and consequences were immediate.

That early experience set a baseline that still governs my work: clarity is a responsibility, not a style choice. That responsibility often places me in advisory roles—helping leaders make decisions when tools, timelines, and consequences are misaligned.

Early systems, real stakes.

I’ve consistently worked at moments when new tools arrived before best practices existed.

In 1995, with support from staff at the Alabama Supercomputer Center in Huntsville, my office became one of the first in state government to use high-speed internet connections into the Capitol. The Supercomputer Center installed and maintained the T1 lines; my role was to put them to use. Using the book, How to Write HTML in a Week, I built what became the state government’s first webpages—developing them in-house for real-world use rather than as a technical demonstration. The announcement ran as a six-column banner headline in the Montgomery Advertiser the following morning.

In 2000, I helped push real-time exit polling using Palm VII devices—work that preceded the Florida recount and exposed how fragile systems become when technology, process, and judgment fall out of alignment—and how quickly technical choices turn into governance problems.

Beginning in 2012, with the release of Apple’s iBooks Author, I built interactive books for the iPad, treating publishing not as static output but as a system integrating media, structure, and reader behavior.

Later, while promoting STEM programs for ExxonMobil, I learned that scale, incentives, and institutional constraints matter as much as creativity.

Across every domain, the pattern held: tools arrived early; responsibility could not.

Judgment before tools.

I do not begin with platforms, frameworks, or automation.

Every system, workflow, or use of AI starts with three questions:

What problem are we actually solving?
What constraints truly matter?
What does “finished” really look like?

Tools amplify intent; they do not replace it. When intent is vague, automation simply scales confusion. This approach is the same whether I’m advising on AI adoption, designing internal systems, or pressure-testing decisions before they become policy.

Responsibility in an AI age.

Artificial intelligence is the latest inflection point in a familiar pattern.

AI does not remove responsibility—it concentrates it. Decisions that once unfolded slowly now propagate instantly. Assumptions harden into outputs. Prompts become policy. Systems behave whether or not anyone is prepared to own the results.

If something produces outcomes, someone must be accountable for:

the assumptions behind it
the data it relies on
the prompts and workflows that shape it
and the downstream effects it creates

I design with that reality in mind.

Video as working documentation.

Video here is not performance or promotion.

I use it to document decisions as they’re made, explain systems that would otherwise remain implicit, and show finished work operating in context—not in theory. A well-made video captures sequencing, tradeoffs, and judgment in ways text alone cannot.

When video appears on this site, it exists to clarify thinking—not to manufacture attention.

Durable work.

Whether the output is a process, a website, a product, a video, or a body of writing, the aim is durability.

Good work should be:

understandable by another competent person
maintainable without mythology
and improvable without starting over

If a system only works because its creator is present to explain it, it isn’t finished.

Context.

This site documents the thinking behind the work. It connects to projects rooted in craft, civics, and applied technology that live elsewhere and have their own homes.

Updates here may not be frequent.
They will be intentional.

Much of this work begins as advisory and becomes operational only when decisions are clear.