For more than twenty years I have worked on the websites, data, and infrastructure people rely on, most of that time for federal agencies, usually with Drupal, AWS, Azure, Terraform, and whatever the problem calls for.

At BLEN Corp, I lead solutioning across our federal engagements. I write the technical approaches and solution architectures behind our proposals and RFI responses, support capture and oral presentations, and build the prototypes we bring to tech challenges and hackathons.

Together we have modernized the platforms behind agencies like USPTO, the Department of the Interior, and USDA, moving them to the cloud, onto containers, and onto DevSecOps pipelines built for federal security requirements. We keep pushing into emerging technology too, from practical AI to open-source tools for building accessible government apps.

I studied computer science at the University of Tennessee and the University of Maryland, and interned at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and TeamHealth.

What I do

Most of my time goes to cloud infrastructure and DevSecOps: designing platforms in Terraform and OpenTofu, running Drupal and the services around it on containers (ECS Fargate and EKS on AWS, Container Apps on Azure), and building the GitHub Actions and GitLab pipelines that scan, test, and deploy them. A good share of it is security work for federal authorizations: remediating cATO findings mapped to NIST 800-53, FIPS-compliant builds, and private networking. I still write application code too, and help keep Drupal current across major versions, from 7 through 11.

Earlier on, I helped the CDC, PCORI, the American Institutes for Research, the Truman Foundation, and the Biotechnology Industry Organization move from legacy content management systems to Drupal.

BLEN also builds its own products, and I have had a hand in several. Callr dialed you into conference calls straight from your calendar and was covered by TechCrunch. Moxit grew into an all-in-one platform for child care centers and was acquired by Wonderschool in 2021. AssetMan automates asset tracking for small and mid-sized companies. And Unfurlough.us went from idea to launch in five hours during the 2013 shutdown to connect furloughed federal workers with freelance work.

Experience

  • USPTO

    USPTO.gov

    The agency's public website and intranet, built on Drupal. In 2021 it became one of the first full production systems USPTO moved from its own data centers to the cloud, live 28 days after hands-on work began. It has since moved through every major Drupal release from 7 to 11 and onto a containerized platform defined entirely as code, with scaling that takes seconds instead of minutes and much faster builds.

  • Nexus DOI Interior Business Center

    Acquisition management portal for the Interior Business Center, built with React, Hono/tRPC, and Drupal 11 on Azure. Designed the platform in Terraform on Azure Container Apps, with private networking inside DOI's shared network and GitHub Actions pipelines gated by security scans.

  • GHG Quantification Mobile App USDA Farm Production and Conservation

    Mobile application for quantifying the greenhouse gas outcomes of conservation practices funded under the Inflation Reduction Act. Designed its React Native architecture, with offline sync, and an AWS backend on Aurora PostgreSQL, Cognito, and Lambda.

  • USPTO Open Data Portal USPTO

    The developer hub where the public finds USPTO's patent and trademark APIs and bulk datasets. Containerized the Drupal stack with CI/CD to AWS Fargate, and built D3 and React visualizations embedded in Drupal through progressive decoupling.

  • ED.gov U.S. Department of Education

    Migrated the site's custom modules from Drupal 6 to 7, improved the Drupal 6 site's performance while the rebuild was planned, and maintained the agency's WordPress blog.

  • Data.ED.gov U.S. Department of Education

    A Drupal and MapBox platform for publishing grant program and performance datasets under the Open Data Initiative. Built OpenData Publisher, the module that turns each imported dataset into listing pages, sortable tables, charts, and maps from a single form.

Open source

Most of my contributed code is Drupal modules on drupal.org, where I also mentor new contributors.

  • Static Site Generator: generates a complete HTML copy of a Drupal site so it can be hosted without PHP or a database. Co-maintainer since 2018.
  • CSS/JS Aggregation Retention: restores time-based cleanup of CSS and JS aggregates, which Drupal 10.1 removed and static generators depend on. Author and maintainer.
  • Gov Analytics Dashboard: a Drupal implementation of the 18F analytics dashboard. Sandbox project, 2016.
  • OpenData Publisher: one of the first Drupal modules for publishing open data catalogs, from 2011. Sandbox project, with source on GitHub.

On GitHub I keep smaller tools and examples, mostly Terraform and Ansible for AWS, and send the occasional patch upstream to projects like DDEV.

Talks

  • Drupal GovCon 2024: “The power of shared resources: How two teams shared knowledge to migrate the agency blog into Drupal,” co-presented with USPTO staff.

Hackathons

  • Vibecon at Y Combinator, November 2025. Picked from more than 2,000 applicants as one of 250 builders at Y Combinator HQ. Our team finished in the top three of our pod.
  • VA Veterans Health Hackathon, Tampa, August 2025. Accepted as a hacker for the three-day event.
  • SCSP AI+ Expo Hackathon, June 2025. Our team won first place in the Meta track and second place overall with Mission Bridge, an AI-powered platform that helps veterans transition to civilian life.

Credentials

  • B.S. in Computer Science, University of Maryland
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect
  • Acquia Certified Developer, Drupal 8