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.

I thought I hated software development in college. Turned out I just hadn't met someone who showed me what it actually was — solving problems. My professor Guy Evans did that for me. I've been doing the same thing for manufacturers and distillers ever since.

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 seen what goes and what stays.

The interesting thing about bourbon? The labor IS the bourbon. You can't engineer away the rickhouse rotation, the barrel movement, the hands in the process without destroying what makes it worth anything. I stand in both worlds. I've seen very few people who actually do.

That's the intersection I work from. That's what I bring to the table.

I run HamDevCo — fractional AI and tech leadership for manufacturers who need CAIO-level thinking without the $350K loaded cost. I speak at conferences. I show up at Louder Than Life. I make bourbon in a town that's been making it for 200 years.

Renaissance man was the 5-year goal. It's what I'm working toward.