I came up through film production in New Orleans — not as a director or cinematographer, but as a grip, then a best boy, working the physical infrastructure that makes a set function. It's a job that teaches you what most people never learn: that the visible work depends on invisible systems, and that the person who manages the logistics makes the day.

I build software now, but I build it the way a grip rigs — to hold weight, to solve a specific problem, to be struck and rebuilt tomorrow. My inventory platform, Dummy Check, emerged from hours wasted on manual counts in hot trailers. My union tools emerged from watching members navigate broken password recovery and opaque reimbursement forms. In each case, the pattern is the same: a friction point that costs real people real time, and a system that can be built to eliminate it.

What distinguishes my approach is not technical sophistication — I use AI as my engineering team, describing problems in natural language and iterating through collaboration rather than syntax. What distinguishes it is my taste for leverage. I don't build products; I build machines that can build products. My holding company, Devlines, exists to share infrastructure across vertical SaaS plays. My documentation systems exist so that future collaborators — human or artificial — can work as if they've been on the project for months. Every asset is designed to pay off more than once.

There's a phrase in design: "the user should never have to think about this." I apply it to domains where no one thought to. A reimbursement form. A rate lookup. Counting sandbags at the end of a fourteen-hour day. These aren't glamorous problems. They don't attract venture capital or magazine profiles. But solved well, they disappear entirely — and the disappearance is the point. The best grip work is invisible. The best interface is the one you don't notice. Design with you in mind. Meet the user where they are.

I think like a gambler who knows the value of risk, like a fabricator who understands tolerances, like a union leader who's seen the power of collective action. I'm drawn to markets where incentives are misaligned — where the spreadsheet truth diverges from the story people tell — because that's where the edge lives.