The Dispatch
Overlaps between leadership, neurodivergence, and systems.
Welcome to the Outpost
Whether I'm debugging in a datacenter or navigating a school IEP, the systems are different, but the heart is the same.
Documentation as a Leadership Practice
Every undocumented system is a single point of failure wearing a person's name. Documentation isn't a nice-to-have. It's a resilience strategy.
Blast Radius: Why Infrastructure Teams Build Tools
Infrastructure teams build tools because their blast radius is enormous. When your work touches every application in the organization, the leverage of a good tool (or the damage of a bad one) scales differently than it does for an application team.
Work From Home Ergonomics: The Office I've Built Over Time
I didn't build my home office all at once. It evolved piece by piece over a few years, driven by actual pain points rather than aspirational Pinterest boards. Here's what I'm running, what I'd buy again, and what I'm still evaluating.
The Homelab as Creative Outlet: Why I Keep Building Things Nobody Asked For
The homelab isn't about saving money on cloud hosting. It's about having a space where I can build, break, and iterate without a ticket, a timeline, or a stakeholder.
Palworld 1.0 Dedicated Server: A Docker Homelab Build on Ubuntu 26
Palworld hit 1.0 this week and I wanted back in. A Proxmox VM, an Ubuntu 26 template, Docker Compose, and about an hour of troubleshooting DNS quirks later, I had a dedicated server running in the basement.
Making Work Visible: Data-Driven Conversations with Leadership
If your team's work isn't visible, it doesn't exist in the minds of the people who control headcount, budget, and priorities. Data fixes that, but only if you present it in a language leadership actually speaks.
The Transition Home: It's OK to Need a Moment
Without a commute to decompress, the transition from 'engineering manager' to 'dad' happens in the time it takes to walk down a hallway. That's not enough, and pretending it is helps no one.
Keep Your Hobbies Unmonetized
The moment you start thinking about ROI on a hobby, you've turned something you love into something you owe. I've watched it happen with photography, copywriting, and smoking meat, and the pattern is always the same.
Finding Time for Self-Care When the Calendar Says No
You can't pour from an empty cup, but nobody tells you that the cup has a slow leak and the only time to refill it is 5:30 AM or never.
Traveling with Kids: Parenting in a Different ZIP Code
Travel doesn't pause the parenting. It just changes the variables. The routines still matter, the needs don't shrink, and the meltdowns have new triggers you haven't mapped yet.
Fun First: Extracurriculars Without the Pressure
Swim class isn't about producing an Olympic athlete. Ninja gymnastics isn't about competition prep. The goal is joy, body confidence, and one more environment where my kids feel capable.
LLMs as a Team Multiplier: Driving Innovation Without Losing the Human
The value of AI on my team isn't that it writes code for us. It's that it lowers the activation energy for engineers to try things they wouldn't have attempted otherwise.
Minecraft, Hackathons, and the Case for Unstructured Creativity
My kid builds redstone contraptions with no spec and no deadline. My engineers build their best prototypes under the same conditions. The pattern isn't a coincidence.
Lowest Common Denominators: Managing 13 Engineers and 2 Kids
Both roles require the same voice: not a dictator, but a facilitator who removes blockers. The overlap is bigger than you think.
Accepted: Gies iMBA at University of Illinois
Wanted to share that I've been accepted into the Gies College of Business iMBA program at University of Illinois for the fall 2026 term.
LLMs as a Parenting Copilot: Using AI to Translate the World
I'm not asking an LLM to parent for me. I'm asking it to help me translate the world into a format my kids can process.
Fishing with Kids: Shore to Boat, Rocks to Reels
It started on shore with grandparents, tangled lines, and thrown rocks. Eventually the kids wanted to try the boat. Fishing turned out to be one of the better family reset buttons we've found.
Incident Response at Home
In the datacenter, when a server goes down, we don't scream at the hardware. We look for the root cause. Why should a meltdown be any different?
Change Management at Home
In infrastructure, we phase rollouts because we know that too much change at once causes outages. At home, the same principle applies, just with higher emotional stakes.