Greenville–Spartanburg, SC
Senior Backend Engineer Technical Lead
I build secure enterprise software for law enforcement agencies across the United States and internationally — backend systems, search infrastructure, and integrated hardware/software platforms where reliability is not negotiable.
Twelve years in, my work keeps landing on the parts that decide whether a system is actually usable: making a record lookup return in seconds instead of minutes, replacing a two-day manual release with a pipeline, rebuilding hot paths in C++ so they fit the hardware an agency actually has. More recently that has extended to working out where AI genuinely helps in a security-sensitive environment — and where it does not.
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Professional and client engagements. Most of this code is proprietary and not publicly linkable, so each entry is described by problem, approach, and measured outcome.
DataWorks Plus
The primary lookup screen was a form with hundreds of fields, and finding a single record took several minutes of an officer’s time. I built a Lucene-backed search experience to replace it with a single query box.
Outcome Typical record lookup dropped from several minutes to seconds, and it became the primary search path for agency users.
DataWorks Plus
Build and release was fully manual and took roughly two days. I designed and implemented an Azure DevOps CI pipeline, then automated deployment to a dedicated validation machine with post-deployment testing so installation defects surfaced before release rather than in the field.
Outcome Build-and-release time fell from about two days to under two hours; production hotfixes dropped by approximately 40%.
DataWorks Plus
I helped lead the initiative to research and evaluate AI technologies for a security-sensitive environment, assessing open-source and LLM-based tooling against security, maintainability, and cost criteria — and produced the approved guidelines that let engineering teams adopt it without a compliance exception.
Outcome Adopted tooling cut routine development tasks by roughly 30% and established the company’s first AI usage standards.
DataWorks Plus
High-volume operations were straining the constrained hardware agencies actually run on. I rebuilt the performance-critical modules in C and C++, targeting both processing time and memory footprint.
Outcome Processing time on high-volume operations fell by approximately 50%, with a lower memory footprint on the same hardware.
WiseTech Global
Product managers were hand-transcribing tariff data out of PDF documents to keep CargoWise current. I built an OCR-based tool to extract and parse that data automatically.
Outcome Preparing a tariff update went from roughly a full day to under an hour.
Trinity Bible Church
Child pickup process was slow and error-prone. I built a secure, web API–driven application to track and verify child and teen check-outs.
Outcome Replaced the legacy process which eliminated manual matching errors and reduced check out time to mere minutes for ~100 children.
Shadow Ridge Baptist Church
A secure automation system that processes new-resident information and generates the outreach materials from it — contact lists, personalized postcards, and QR codes — end to end.
Outcome Turned a multi-day manual effort into a same-day mailing, making consistent monthly outreach practical.
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Public repositories. VerseLink is the same idea — replace a Bible verse reference with its full text, wherever you happen to be typing — solved three times against three very different platform constraints.
C++
A background application that installs a global hotkey and replaces verse references with full verse text in whatever window has focus.
Kotlin
The same capability as a secondary keyboard — a custom input method that expands references inline in any app on the device.
C#
A PowerToys Run plugin that types verse text as though it came from the keyboard, so it works in applications that reject pasted input.
Progressive Web App
An installable, fully offline PWA for daily catechism review — 91 questions, configurable pacing, quiz and reading modes, service-worker caching, and export/import of progress between devices.
Single-file web app
A zero-backend party tool for Age of Empires II that assigns teams and secret traitors, keeping all shared state in the URL hash so there is no server to run.
Dart / Flutter
A small Flutter client that polls the Planning Center API for the most recent check-outs of an event.
Private repositories — described here rather than linked, because the source is not public.
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2022 — Present
DataWorks Plus Greenville, SC
Lead the design, development, and delivery of secure enterprise software and integrated hardware/software solutions used by law enforcement agencies nationally and internationally, including LAPD, NYPD, and Michigan State Police. Mentor developers and support engineers, and partner with product, sales, and support through pre-sales and delivery.
2021 — 2022
Code Maze Remote
Authored technical articles and runnable sample code on C#, .NET, and software development practices for an audience of approximately 300,000 monthly readers, working through a structured editorial workflow in GitHub and JIRA.
2016 — 2021
DataWorks Plus Greenville, SC
Built and maintained enterprise software in C#, VB.NET, JavaScript, SQL Server, C++, and Python, delivering features used daily by agencies nationwide. Contributed to architecture discussions, code reviews, and production troubleshooting.
2014 — 2016
DataWorks Plus Greenville, SC
Provided Tier-2 support for enterprise software deployed to law enforcement agencies, keeping mission-critical systems within required uptime targets, and automated system imaging and recurring maintenance with Python and Batch scripting.
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