Stereotypes exist for a reason.

I landed my first development contract in high school in 1985. I enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps after high school, became a Navy Surface Warfare Officer in 1995, and hung up my uniform in 2000. Along the way I earned a degree in Weapons & Systems Engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy.

After my military service I helped found a number of technology startups, always in a product development role. In 2008 I landed my first "real" job, writing software to facilitate order entry & execution on the floor of the Chicago Board Options Exchange. In 2011 I founded a company that built data management systems for big financial institutions, including Northwestern Mutual, Invesco, and Bridgewater Associates.

In 2019 I left institutional finance and moved to Bali, Indonesia. The problems got more interesting immediately.

• VeteranCrowd Rewards is a FinTech startup turning the loyalty industry upside down with merchant-first cashback infrastructure. I'm the architect & lead dev, and the patterns that have come out of this work are some of the best I've ever produced.
• John Galt Services connects world-class Indonesian professional talent with US companies that need multilingual customer care and operations support. I founded JGS after discovering firsthand that young Indonesian professionals are among the most undervalued talent on the planet: tech-savvy, multilingual, and driven.
• jeeves-server is a secure file browser, markdown viewer, and webhook gateway. Browse files, render Markdown with embedded diagrams, export to PDF/DOCX, share with expiring links.
• jeeves-watcher keeps a Qdrant vector store in sync with filesystem changes. Config-driven rules engine, semantic search API, and CLI. The backbone of a personal knowledge architecture.
• entity-manager solves rational indexing & cross-shard querying at scale in NoSQL databases, so you can focus on application logic instead of access patterns.
• get-dotenv is the dotenv-powered automation tool that lets me perform high-quality releases across 16 API projects, a front end, and over a dozen supporting libraries, every two weeks, single-handedly.
• STAN is an AI-assisted dev tool that generates deterministic dependency graphs for LLM context selection. Built for engineers who want to feed their AI tools the right context, not all of it.

See my repos for lots more useful tools & templates!

I've lived on Bali since 2019. The thing that surprises everyone who comes here to build is the depth of local talent.

Indonesia produces world-class engineers, designers, and product thinkers. Many speak three or more languages. They come from families that farmed rice and fished for a living, and they carry that work ethic into everything they do. The digital nomad ecosystem on Bali has created a uniquely tech-forward culture among young Indonesian professionals, and the gap between what they can do and what the market pays them is enormous.

If you're building a team and you're not looking here, you're leaving serious capability on the table. I built John Galt Services because somebody needed to close that gap.

See Karmic Rules for Writing Pretty Good Code. They're a work in progress. That's the best kind.

👈 Use one of the links over there!