West Des Moines, Iowa · Booking 2026

From MediNotes to Claude: thirty years of shipping software that matters.

I've led engineering at healthcare-IT companies, held CTO roles at Alopex and BettrLife, and now build open-source AI tooling — SpecCritic, PlanCritic, Prism — for teams trying to make LLMs actually reliable.

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30+
Years shipping
11
Articles on Medium
40+
Open source projects
03
Industry awards
01 · Writing

Essays on AI, developer tools, and the craft of shipping software.

All articles
APR 19 · 2026 · AGENTS

I Built Five Gates Around My Coding Agent. I Was Missing the Sixth.

Every non-deterministic step in an agent workflow deserves a deterministic gate — and context selection is the one nobody's building.

Read on Medium →
MAR 04 · 2026 · AI

The Terminal Is Still the Best IDE: Building an AI-Native Development Workflow with CLI Tools

Why the command line — not the chat window — is where AI-native development is actually happening.

Read on Medium →
JAN 28 · 2026 · AI

Why I Stopped Letting LLMs See Everything

A practical case for bounded context: what to hide from the model, what to show it, and why the default of "paste the whole repo" is the wrong one.

Read on Medium →
02 · Open source

An AI-native development toolchain — in four acts.

All projects
speccritic
0

Evaluates specifications as formal contracts. Finds contradictions, hidden assumptions, and missing prerequisites before a line of code is written.

GoSpecsStep 01
plancritic
1

Reviews implementation plans and returns structured critique: contradictions, ambiguities, missing prerequisites, and concrete patches.

GoPlanningStep 02
prism
1

Local-first AI code review CLI. Reviews diffs, commits, and PRs across Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, and Ollama — with SARIF output and CI-friendly exit codes.

GoMulti-LLMStep 03
realitycheck
0

Intent enforcement for agentic systems. Verifies that the code an agent produced matches the spec and plan it was given — not just that it compiles.

GoVerificationStep 04
03 · Experience

Twenty years in rooms where software had to actually work.

Full CV
Feb 2026 — Present
Fractional CTO · Principal Engineer
Hills Consulting LLC — executive leadership and hands-on engineering for organizations building or modernizing complex systems.
West Des Moines, IA
Dec 2024 — Feb 2026
Chief Technology Officer
Alopex — rebuilt a healthcare care-management platform from fragmented services to a unified Go / React / AWS architecture.
Des Moines, IA
May 2022 — Jul 2023
Technical Director · Lead Architect
ConnectRN — led 5 principal engineers; owned the reliability roadmap and resolved critical bottlenecks across a high-traffic nurse-staffing platform.
Waltham, MA
Nov 2021 — May 2022
Principal Engineer
ConnectRN — built financial systems for clinician pay and billing; designed microservices supporting dynamic pay structures.
Waltham, MA
2015 — Nov 2021
Fractional CTO · Architecture Consultant
Hills Consulting LLC — embedded CTO and architecture work for ConnectRN, Certintell, Redivus Health, Play-It Health, MyDiabetesHome, and others.
Healthcare Tech
2010 — 2015
Chief Technology Officer · Principal Engineer
BettrLife — built the team and product from the early days through scale. Maintained HIPAA compliance through external audits.
Urbandale, IA
Earlier
SVP Operations · VP Software Development · Chief Architect · MediNotes → VP Operations, Practice Solutions · Eclipsys
Two decades in healthcare IT leadership — EHR systems, practice solutions, and the era that taught me what actually breaks in production.
Healthcare IT

Let's build something remarkable.

Currently available for consulting — systems architecture, developer tooling, LLM infrastructure, and fractional CTO engagements.

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