Staff Software Engineer · Design Systems · Agentic Engineering
Design-systems architect and accessibility advocate — 15+ years shipping platforms, from a university-scale design system to billion-dollar commerce. Today I put agents in production and build through an agentic engineering practice.
About
It started with Legos, evolved into code, and now extends to renovating my home. Understanding how things work — and making them better — never stopped being satisfying.
Web standards matter. Semantic HTML, progressive enhancement, and accessibility aren't checkboxes — they're the foundation of good engineering. The browser gives us so much for free.
The best work doesn't hand off — it moves from Figma to shipped component in one motion. Design tokens as the contract, design systems as the delivery: tools that let non-developers build websites.
My wife and I have spent a decade adopting the "broken bulldogs" others passed over. They teach patience, unconditional love, and joy in the present moment.
Track Record
October 2021 - Present
The University of Maryland
July 2020 - October 2021
July 2019 - June 2020
Under Armour
November 2011 - March 2019
ALEX+TOM
Plus side ventures shipped end-to-end: CTO of Macro Meals (profitable year one, exited) and founder of Draft Slot — a graduate thesis turned production platform whose Laravel rebuild was written entirely with Claude.
Read the full resumeAgentic Engineering
In 2026, “I use AI” can mean two very different things: agents shipped into production, and agents that build the software itself. I work in both — and keep them distinct, because each is its own discipline.
Agents building the software itself: Draft Slot's entire Laravel codebase written with Claude — 1,800+ commits, 347 Pest tests, and no missed draft night since the rebuild. The discipline is requirements first, validation gates, and a bar that never moves.
Software acting while users watch: university search grounded in a Vertex-indexed corpus spanning roughly 100 umd.edu sites, an ingestion agent that turns a URL into draft-grid entries, and alt-text and marketing-copy agents shipped in a platform pipeline. The discipline is grounding, sourcing, and human-in-the-loop review.
Selected Work
A selection of projects I’ve worked on throughout my career
10x delivery · production code built with Claude, held to the same bar
An agentic engineering practice traced through its evolution — from simple prompts against Claude 3.5 Sonnet to context engineering, a skills catalog, custom harnesses, and orchestrated multi-agent loops — developed in parallel on Draft Slot and University of Maryland platform work.
University of Maryland · 100+ adopting sites in year one
How SOLID principles enabled a platform-agnostic design system that works across PHP, Java, React, Vue, Angular, and static sites without forcing technology choices.
University of Maryland · APIs for thousands of campus sites
Building API services that let thousands of university websites share news, events, and alerts automatically.
