About

I'm a CTO, organic chemistry professor, and builder in Fresno, California. The through-line across all of it is a belief I formed years ago and have only grown more convinced of: the durable skill in any technical discipline is learning how to learn, not accumulating facts you'll need to remember.

I co-founded T3 Software in 2023, where I build T3 Books, a fund accounting platform serving nonprofits from $150K to $2.5M in annual budget. I'm the sole developer on the product, which now spans a substantial frontend, eight Firebase Cloud Function codebases, real-time BigQuery analytics, and integrations with Plaid, Bill.com, Stripe, and Google Document AI. I've built most of it in deep partnership with Claude Code, which has given me strong opinions about what AI-augmented development actually requires, and what it doesn't.

Before software, I was a scientist. A B.S. in Biochemistry from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, an M.S. in Chemistry from CSU Fresno where I synthesized curcumin derivatives with anticancer potential, and enough time in front of NMR and HPLC machines to have real feelings about both. I've been teaching chemistry at College of the Sequoias since 2016, where I teach general and organic chemistry. In 2018 I designed and piloted the college's first hybrid online chemistry program, and from 2020 to 2022 I served as elected Division Chair of the Science Department, the role in which I got to help guide my colleagues through the heart of COVID.

Before community college, I taught high school chemistry and physics. In 2015, Stanford University recognized me for exceptional teaching, prompted by a former student who'd gone on to Stanford CS on a full scholarship. The thing he said I'd taught him wasn't chemistry. It was how to learn.

That idea runs through everything I do. It's the philosophy behind how I teach organic chemistry, a course famous for rewarding memorization, where I show my students early that memorizing won't get them an A, and then let the material prove it for me. It's increasingly what I think matters most for software engineers as AI takes on more of the implementation work. The developers who thrive over the next decade won't be the ones who memorized the most framework APIs. They'll be the ones who know how to stay oriented while the ground shifts under them, who treat every new model release as a learning problem instead of a productivity problem.

I'm also a builder in the older, more hands-on sense of the word. Before I was writing software full-time, I ran a wedding photography business. I've welded, poured concrete, run natural gas lines, and installed my own mini-split HVAC system. I live with my wife Emily and our four kids in a mid-century house I've restored with my own hands. I think there's a real connection between working this way and working well with software: both reward people who think in systems and who are willing to be wrong and fix it.

I'm a member of the Anthropic Partner Network and am completing the Claude Certified Architect, Foundations training. I write here about architectural judgment in AI-assisted software, the parts of teaching that transfer into developer education, and about anything else I observe from my position as a CTO, professor, builder, and father.

You can find my work on GitHub, watch my organic chemistry lectures on YouTube, read my full CV, or see what I'm building.