Chapter 01
Learning the physical layer
Computers, early networking, troubleshooting, cabling, and learning by taking systems apart until their behavior made sense.
computers → networks → cabling
Career journey
Different work.
One continuous thread.
A conventional résumé can make this path look fragmented. It has felt more like a sequence: each kind of work exposed the next layer of the system and gave me a reason to learn it.
Chapter 02
Building systems for real places
Residential and commercial work made the constraints tangible: existing construction, limited access, old wiring, deadlines, users, and equipment that had to keep working.
networking → AV → surveillance → automation
Chapter 03
The SalemNet years
Running SalemNet meant moving across roles—support, design, wiring, installation, configuration, and the follow-up call when something failed. Subcontract work widened the scale and variety of systems.
independent work → larger installations
Chapter 04
Electrical
Electrical training and recent field work added a deeper understanding of power distribution, traditional trade practice, sequencing, safety, and the physical infrastructure underneath every digital system.
low voltage → power systems
Chapter 05
Building my own tools
Software began as a practical extension of earlier work: a way to organize information, automate repetitive processes, connect systems, and make complicated projects easier to reason about.
infrastructure → databases → automation
Chapter 06
Current experiments
TraceIQ and the MCP Tool Platform push that work into data modeling, provenance, orchestration, and AI-assisted development. The tools changed; the habit of tracing the whole system did not.
software → information systems
Chapter 07
Still in progress
I do not have a polished answer for what the next chapter is. I am still building, learning, and finding out which problems are worth staying with.
next → unknown