I'm Cat. I'm an infrastructure engineer based in Nashville. For over a decade, I've worked alongside technical founders and engineering teams at critical inflection points; building foundations that hold, migrations that don't hurt, and systems that breathe with teams as they scale.
I hold a degree in Biochemistry but pivoted to tech when a deep dive into WordPress sparked an obsession. I started out in front-end ecommerce, but curiosity pulled me deeper into the back-end, and ultimately into cloud infrastructure.
Along the way, working on large-scale open-source projects like Spinnaker, I fell in love with developer tooling and the operational stability that rigorous CI/CD systems bring.
Today, I live in the intersection of systems architecture, DevOps, and product execution. I like to get my hands dirty and still view coding as a craft.
I believe in simplicity and clarity. A system that's easy to reason about will outlast one that's architecturally impressive but operationally opaque. I'd rather reach for the boring solution that works than the clever one that needs constant attention.
What guides me
I practice Wu Wei as a discipline. Effortless action isn't about doing less — it's about doing the right thing at the right time so everything else falls into place. Alignment and friction reduction; the work flows from there.
I think about time the way Oliver Burkeman does in Four Thousand Weeks: we have less of it than we think, so every choice about how to spend it carries weight. Our power lies in choosing exactly what to ignore.
I think about work the way Paul Jarvis does in Company of One: intentionality, focus, and leanness deliver meaningful results for real people.
After all this time: I'm just a problem solver, not a technology wizard.
When I'm not working you can catch me longboard dancing, hiking in Tennessee forests, experimenting with my Prusa 3D printer, supporting my friends' bands at local shows, and hunting for Ordovician fossils in my nearby creeks.
Connection
If you're looking for an independent technical ally to unblock your engineering organization, let's talk.