About.Me
Early years
My love for computers started early. In 1984, when I was eleven, I wrote my first program in BASIC on an Atari 1200XL. It asked the capitals of each state. My late grandfather encouraged me, and I spent afternoons after school playing with Lotus 1-2-3 on TRS-80 Model I-IV machines. I have been writing software ever since.
Enterprise IT
After Oklahoma State University, I started my career as a Systems Engineer and then joined BMC Software in 1998. For years I traveled the world consulting on IT and monitoring strategies for companies like HSBC in Tokyo and London, AT&T, and Los Alamos National Laboratory, and later specialized in application discovery and CMDB work at Mercury Interactive, which Hewlett Packard acquired for $4.5 billion.
SCADA and today
For the last fifteen years I have worked in oil and gas SCADA. I have designed and supported large CygNet systems, written control logic and integrations, and built the kind of tools that engineers actually use day to day. Today I run Jestrion LLC, where I contract as an embedded engineer for a major operator and build my own software. My main product is Narya Command, an AI agent orchestration platform for SCADA engineers that is now in pilot with two operators.
AI and production judgment
What has kept me going for forty years is that I still love this. I still write code every day. Lately that has meant going deep on AI: building RAG systems, agents, and MCP servers, and trying different architectures to see what holds up. The most useful thing I have gotten out of it is judgment about where these tools actually help and where they do not. That is the part most people skip, and it is the part that matters when you are putting this into production.