My story

I grew up in Bardstown, Kentucky. People hear "small town" and picture quaint. What Bardstown actually is — is frontier. The families who built this town came when it was the western edge of civilization. Catholics pushing west, building churches, schools, hospitals from nothing. Those families never left. That kind of deep-rooted, build-everything resourcefulness is in the water here. In the bourbon. It's the only frame I know for how to approach a problem: you're here, you have what you have, now build.

I thought I hated software development. Turned out I just hadn't met someone who showed me what it actually was — solving problems. Guy Evans did that for me — my first software mentor, at my first job out of college, at a manufacturing company called Trim Masters International. I've been doing the same thing across industries ever since. Showing up. Finding the actual problem underneath the stated one. Building the thing that fixes it.

My career has been, at its core, about turning meat to metal. That's my phrase for what happens in every business: cost accounting puts a label on human labor — "overhead," "waste" — and the machine comes to replace it. I've been the machine. I've brought the automation. I've had the honest conversations with the people on the other side of it. I've seen what gets replaced and what doesn't — and what never should. That's not a consultant's perspective. That's something you can only know from being inside it.

That's the lens I bring to AI adoption. Not hype. Not a framework from a whitepaper. Real perspective, from someone who's been in the rooms where those decisions actually get made.

I run HamDevCo — fractional AI and tech leadership for mid-market companies who need CAIO-level thinking without the $350K loaded cost. I've worked across sixteen industries. I speak at conferences. I show up at Louder Than Life. I live in a town that's been distilling bourbon for 200 years, and my family has been here longer than Kentucky has been a state. I understand what it means to be rooted in something that doesn't move fast.

Some problems need a ninja. Some need a samurai. Most need someone who knows the difference.