About

I wrote my first program on a Commodore 64 at age eight. My dad sat down with me and showed me how it worked, and that was it. Thirty-five years later the instinct is the same. When something doesn't work the way it should, you figure out how to fix it. When a tool doesn't exist, you build it.

Who I am

By my late teens I was running my own web design and development business under the Luminous3D brand. Client work, real deadlines, real problems to solve. Then came six years in the Navy aboard USS Toledo (SSN-769), a Los Angeles-class fast-attack submarine. I graduated the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program pipeline, earned rating EM-3354 (Submarine Nuclear Propulsion Plant Operator, Electrical), and qualified on watch stations including Shutdown Reactor Operator, Shutdown Electrical Operator, Electrical Operator, and Throttleman. Discharged honorably as EM2 / E-5.

That environment doesn't tolerate approximation. System reliability isn't a best practice, it's a survival requirement. That standard has shaped everything I've done since.

For the past 13+ years I've worked as a Senior Risk Control Specialist at Travelers, focusing on Equipment Breakdown and Boiler & Machinery. My work is applied systems analysis on the equipment stack behind every industrial facility and every hyperscale data center: switchgear, transformers, generators, UPS, chillers, HVAC plant, boilers, pressure vessels, turbines, Battery Energy Storage Systems. I evaluate how these systems fail against ASME, NBIC, NEC, NFPA, and IEEE standards, then translate engineering findings into decisions underwriters, brokers, and executives can act on.

What I build

Outside the day job, L3Digital is where the public work lives. Home Assistant couldn't verify that light commands actually succeeded, so I built a verification and retry layer rather than work around it. Claude Code plugins from different sources had no shared design principles, so I wrote my own and built a marketplace around them. Documentation was too expensive for LLMs to navigate efficiently, so Markdown-Keeper is an indexed, queryable database built for that problem.

Same playbook as the risk work: reliability first, root cause over workaround, documented and maintained. Luminous3D is still the name on my home lab and personal infrastructure, but the thread is the same one that started on a C64 in the early 1980s.

These interests feed each other. Home automation pulls me deeper into AI, AI tooling improves my documentation workflows, and better documentation makes everything more maintainable. The projects here reflect that.

Beyond the screen

Formal education gave me a foundation in business and economics, but the learning has never stopped and it's never stayed in one lane. I work with 3D printing and Autodesk Fusion 360 CAD, woodworking, metalworking, PC hardware, and home networking. I read broadly across technical and non-technical subjects. I build things with my hands and with code. Whether I'm designing a part, debugging an integration, or analyzing a risk, it's the same mindset.

I also build things purely for the joy of it, including a turn-based Star Trek strategy game inspired by the 1971 original. Not everything needs a practical justification.

Philosophy

I've always believed that being well-rounded makes you better at the things you specialize in. A narrow expert solves the problem in front of them. Someone who's read widely, worked with their hands, and thought across domains tends to ask better questions before picking up the tools.

Good tooling shouldn't stay private. Everything built here is open source.