An engineer who ended up running the software

I trained as a civil engineer — geology at Bates, then a master’s in civil engineering at the Colorado School of Mines — and spent the first part of my career doing water resources work at Leonard Rice Engineers. That background matters more to how I build software than the software background does. Civil engineering is a discipline organised entirely around the assumption that things fail, and around designing so that failure is contained rather than catastrophic.

That assumption applies to software the same way it applies to dams and pipelines. An agent that can send email, move money, or write to your production database is a system that will eventually do something you did not intend — and so is a script with too much access, or a website with no rollback plan. The interesting engineering is rarely the part that does the intended thing; it is the guardrails for when it doesn’t — approval gates, access boundaries, rollback paths, monitoring that catches drift before a customer does.

I co-founded Aclymate and serve as its CTO. We help companies measure and reduce their carbon footprint. We are a small team, which forced a decision most companies get to defer: either the operational work grows headcount, or someone builds the automation to avoid it. We chose the second, and I built the platform that is still teaching me exactly how far that automation can go.

The part I did not expect was how much of the value came from teaching rather than building. Handing a non-technical colleague a working tool is worth something. Teaching them to specify, build, review, and own it is worth considerably more — and it is the thing almost nobody selling AI services is willing to do, because it makes them unnecessary. That is the work I want more of.

That’s my dog up there — he does not have strong opinions about approval gates, but he sits in on most of my thinking. Outside of work I am an Eagle Scout, I speak French and Spanish passably, and I spend as much of the year as Colorado’s weather allows on its mountains, usually a few steps behind him.