About

I'm a multi-disciplinary engineer based in Issaquah, WA, with a background in materials science and process optimization, plus extensive software engineering experience from my 19-year tenure at Microsoft.

In September 2026 I retired from Microsoft after 19 years, and I'm now building a handful of small businesses full-time, at the intersection of software, sound, and making physical things.

Before software

I trained as a materials scientist — a BS in Ceramic Engineering and an MS in Materials Science from the University of Washington — and worked briefly as a process engineer on LED semiconductor manufacturing before moving into software. As a student, I published the research from my thesis as a first-author paper on sol-gel processing of a scintillator (cadmium tungstate). That materials/process background turned out to matter more than I expected: my first real contribution at Microsoft was bringing formal Design-of-Experiments methodology — the same statistical framework used to optimize industrial processes — into game testing, running a fractional-factorial study across roughly 1,400 graphics configurations to track down performance problems on Flight Simulator.

Nineteen years at Microsoft

The throughline across most of it: getting handed the problem nobody else wanted to touch, and building the tool or system that made it tractable.

I started in test on Flight Simulator and then Microsoft Flight, building automation infrastructure from scratch — including a UI Automation bridge over a UI framework that had no accessibility interface, which the dev team had assumed was infeasible — and running a ~50-machine automated test lab largely solo. I owned security fuzz-testing for Flight's v1.0 release end-to-end and personally tracked down the #1 crash in the shipped product.

I converted from test into development on Fresh Paint, where I ended up solo-rewriting the entire app for the Windows 10 Universal App Platform — recognized with a team award — alongside shipping features like true full-resolution photo export and OneDrive integration.

From there I built a real-time 3D scanning app for phones from an empty repository — camera pipeline, tracing infrastructure, UI architecture — and integrated a partner team's mesh-reconstruction engine into it. That project is also where I moved into people leadership, hiring and ramping up a new team.

I spent the next several years on mobile video (Microsoft Stream, then a shared cross-platform video component used by Teams, OneDrive, Outlook, and Stream — around 14 million monthly users at its peak), eventually managing a distributed team across three time zones and once getting a platform-level bug fixed directly with Apple that improved video playback reliability well beyond just our own app.

Most recently, I led engineering on Copilot in Word — generative AI features for Word, from a patent-pending document-editing technique that shipped to General Availability, to standing up and leading a team building the infrastructure that lets Word's AI agent manipulate native document elements (tables of contents, styles, fields) safely and at scale.

Outside of work

I play in a band and run my own front-of-house mix at gigs, which is what's pulled me into learning audio engineering more seriously — some of that work lives under Work. I also build things: 3D printing, silicone casting, and woodworking with tools I inherited from my father.

This site is where I write about building the ventures, and share whatever else is worth sharing along the way.