Issue 05
Retired stand-up comic. Active technical storyteller. Occasional chaos translator.
Stage presence / hard-earned
Before I spoke about engineering systems, I spent years learning how to earn attention, shape a story, improvise under pressure, and recover when something did not land.
Today, I bring that experience to technical speaking and developer advocacy—making complex ideas approachable without sanding off the truth, the stakes, or the humans inside the system.
Before the technical stage
Long before developer advocacy, I was already learning how to hold a room.
Royal Palm Beach, Florida
I built a loyal Saturday-morning following at a Friendly's while I was in college. The job was live improvisation, audience care, character work, and balloon-based incident response.
Retired after developing a latex allergy from clown white and balloon animals. Occupational hazards: impeccable comedic timing.
St. Augustine, Florida
I hosted the weekend Haunted Pub Tour and filled in on the Haunted Hearse and paranormal research tours. Every night required research, timing, crowd management, local history, and the confidence to lead people into the dark.
The subject matter was literally dead. The audience was often extremely alive.
New York City + Louisville
I performed in New York and Louisville, learning to develop a distinct voice, find the real premise, trim anything that was not serving it, and keep going when the room had other plans.
Retired from stand-up. Still professionally committed to the bit.
Even when the room was noisy, the equipment was questionable, the subject was literally dead, and everyone was drunk or had the itis. Or both.
Same instincts. Different subject matter.
Resilient engineering organizations, platform engineering, developer advocacy, responsible AI, and technical systems that do not treat people as fuel.
Amplify Startups + Code:You students
A Crash Course in Chaos Engineering and Why It Matters
An approachable introduction to chaos engineering: how deliberately testing failure helps teams uncover weak assumptions, learn before incidents, and build systems that recover more gracefully.
Watch on YouTubeCode:You students
A practical DevOps introduction built around a familiar analogy: the ingredients, collaboration, feedback loops, and repeatable process required to deliver something people can actually use.
Watch on YouTubeTechFutures / Women Who Code Conference · NYC · October 2025
A Practical Guide for the Future
A practical workshop on digital sovereignty, secure-by-design systems, open-source alternatives, and building an exit plan from tools that create dependency by design.
The full working deck stays private. The title slide and a few moments from the room are shared here—with one excellent conference soundtrack hiding in plain sight.
About the slides: recordings and approved title art are public. Complete working decks stay in the vault.
