I make complex things
easy to care about.
My career is a single thread: take something technical and hard, find the story inside it, and put that story in front of the people who need it most. At Atlassian, Nutanix, LinearB, and Hazelcast that meant developer portals, onboarding flows, and programs that turned engineers into advocates. Outside work, it means the Mia Kingtide Ocean Adventures series, where a 12-year-old dives Monterey Bay, sails to the Sea of Cortez, and fights to protect the ocean. The marine biology is reviewed by scientists at MBARI and Hopkins Marine Station.
The skill is the same in both. Reduce the complexity. Find the hook. Build the world around the idea until the audience can't look away. Whether the audience is a senior engineer evaluating an API or an eight-year-old on a long car ride, the job is identical: make them feel like the subject was made for them.
AI Technology Leadership
I've spent most of my career at the boundary between technology and adoption. Sometimes that meant building developer platforms. Sometimes it meant building the developer community, documentation, go-to-market system, or organizational structure around them. Increasingly, it means applied AI.
I'm unusual in that I still build. My recent work spans production web and mobile applications, data systems, developer infrastructure, and AI-enabled workflows developed from architecture through deployment.
Advanced executive work spanning AI architecture and model decisions, agentic systems, responsible AI and governance, FinOps, organizational scaling, technology M&A, executive influence, and AI transformation.
The program extended my hands-on engineering and developer-platform background into the organizational and executive questions that determine whether AI systems actually succeed in production.
Before Silicon Valley
I started in 1996, while still a teenager, helping run some of Ontario's earliest public internet cafés in Bradford, Barrie, and Newmarket. Much of the job was teaching people what the internet was, years before it became part of everyday life.
At Seneca College in Toronto, I studied computer graphics and digital media. An internship with the SPACE.com Canada and Starry Night team led to my astronomy imagery being credited in the 2001 release of Deep Space Explorer. I also provided technical support at Astro-Physics, helping serious amateur and professional astronomers run precision equatorial mounts — an early version of the translator-between-complex-systems-and-real-people role I've held ever since.
Alongside running my freelance shop, Digital Salamander, I spent 2004–2008 building production ColdFusion systems inside six companies. This was enterprise engineering: commerce, accessibility, compliance, global operations, reusable frameworks, and early rich internet applications.
Upgraded and maintained a production ColdFusion commerce site.
Built a Section 508-accessible CMS and SOX-compliant rights-management tooling for education technology.
Redeveloped corporate web properties and interfaces for insurance software.
Standardized an internal application framework used across global manufacturing operations and trained other developers on it.
Built more than 30 custom CMS modules and helped launch over a dozen client sites in a senior agency role.
Built across ColdFusion, Flex/AIR, and the early mobile web.
By the time I became visible in the Bay Area ColdFusion and Adobe communities — and long before Developer Relations was a common job title — I had already spent most of a decade shipping and maintaining production software where accessibility, compliance, and operational reliability mattered.
Mia Kingtide Ocean Adventures
An original conservation IP built from zero. Four novels, two illustrated children's books, four audiobooks on Spotify — reviewed by scientists at MBARI, Hopkins Marine Station, and Moss Landing Marine Labs, sailed aboard the restored Western Flyer to the Sea of Cortez, and featured in Monterey County NOW.
Mia Kingtide is a 12-year-old who lives on the Monterey Peninsula, dives, sails, and fights to protect the ocean. The novels follow her from Monterey Bay to the Sea of Cortez and back — tackling overfishing, habitat destruction, and climate change through adventure-first storytelling with a deliberately hopeful frame. Written for middle-grade readers who are already paying attention to the world.
Scientists at MBARI, Hopkins Marine Station, and Moss Landing Marine Labs reviewed the books for scientific accuracy. Physical copies sailed aboard the Western Flyer— John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts' legendary vessel — on its restored voyage back to the Sea of Cortez. Featured in Monterey County NOW.
Pitter Patter Diving Ecosystem
A full media, tourism, and commerce platform built around the thing I care about most. Same discipline as building a developer ecosystem: find content-market fit, build the audience, convert across channels. Validated in the wild with real revenue and real community.
Public Service
Public service alongside my technology career, with an interest in economic development, effective government, and the responsible use of technology.