About Me - TLDR

Senior Software Engineer with 15+ years of experience. Spent 5+ years at Meta working on video products like Facebook and Instagram Live, including time as a team lead. Since then, my code went to space and sent video back down. I joined another startup and led the video platform — launching live streaming, building a mobile app, and improving creator tools. Prior service Army Intel Analyst. Former CTO and cofounder of multiple profitable startups. CS degree from Mizzou.

The Long Version

I started programming when I was 14, making text-based games in GW-BASIC. It was love at first sight. I spent most of my free time learning everything I could about programming and computers. I later attended the University of Missouri–Columbia, where I earned my bachelor's degree in Computer Science. During college, I interned twice at Anheuser-Busch on their Server Operations team, and twice at CARFAX on various product teams.

After graduation, my internship at CARFAX became a full-time role — and it’s also where I fell in love with iOS development. After a year, I left the office life to begin freelancing and exploring the startup world. I co-founded Nightlife, scaling it from a hobby project to a profitable business in 25 U.S. cities. Along the way, I continued building client and personal iOS projects.

In 2015, I stepped away from Nightlife, reduced my freelance work, and enlisted in the U.S. Army as an Intelligence Analyst. Even while in the Army, I couldn’t stay away from building things — I released three new apps to the App Store and continued development on a project for Missouri’s then-Attorney General, Chris Koster.

In my early days in the Army, the most unexpected thing happened, and I met the most amazing woman and love of my life. We got married in 2016 and have been together ever since.

After my military service, I joined Facebook’s Video team, focusing primarily on Live video infrastructure. I worked on Facebook Live for iOS and Web, Live With (our WebRTC-based co-broadcasting feature), and video playback for Workplace (Facebook’s enterprise platform). After four years on the Video team, I transferred to Oculus to explore VR and contribute to the future of immersive media. There, I worked on casting, the Meta Quest TV app, and prototyped a not-yet-released feature.

Since leaving Meta, I’ve stayed deep in the video space — including, quite literally, getting video back from space with TRL11. I joined Trepa Technologies as a Fractional CTO, where I built a custom learning management system for IT and cybersecurity training, designed to better support our military users. While running Trepa, I also joined Punchup - a platform for comedians and comedy fans - where I matured the video product, introduced live streaming, and built both creator and consumer mobile apps.