I'm a "full-stack" designer with ten years UX design, six years front-end development, and four years back-end development. I design products that make technical professionals look good.

My pronouns are he/him.

My particular focus is on data visualization and the sensemaking and research task. I am fascinated by how users sift through, draw conclusions, and build cases from large volumes of data.

Timeline

  • Surgient Engineer
    2003-2007
  • Hyper9 UI Lead
    2007-2011
  • SolarWinds Principal Designer
    2011-2021
  • FeatureBase Principal Designer
    2021-2023
  • Grafana Staff Designer
    2023-Present
  • Surgient

    Stage: Transformation
    Role: Developer
    Tools: C#, C++, XML/XSLT, VMware
    Tenure: 4 years

    Surgient built automation software for virtual servers and networks.

    I started on the UI side, but eventually spent time building our API, working on the data model, designing our agent protocol, and building tools for bulk-editing virtual machine images. I had some really amazing industry veteran mentors during my time at Surgient. They taught me the difference between writing code and building a product.

  • Hyper9

    Stage: Startup
    Role: Developer
    Tools: JQuery, Flex, Maven, Lucene
    Tenure: 3 years

    Hyper9 was a response to the unique problems of managing virtual environments. We crawled virtual asset inventories, then indexed that data in Lucene. We built a suite of search-based tools for alerting, reporting, and performance analysis. Hyper9 was acquired by SolarWinds.

    I led design and construction of the UI; first as an HTML/XHR SPA, then in Flex. Hyper9 was the seed for my interest in the research task, and it was during my time here I first encountered the work of Marti Hearst, Peter Pirolli, and Daniel Russell.

  • SolarWinds

    Stage: Market leader
    Role: Developer, designer
    Tools: C#, Flex, Axure, Sketch
    Tenure: 10 years

    SolarWinds is a leader in the enterprise ITOM and observability market. We built a broad suite of products for system administrators, network managers, SREs, developers, and ops teams.

    I spent my first year helping integrate Hyper9 into the SolarWinds product family. I moved over to the UX team and spent the next nine years leading design on three new products, three major platform features, and countless feature releases.

  • FeatureBase

    Stage: Startup
    Role: Designer
    Tools: Figma, Zeplin, design system, design ops
    Tenure: 2 years

    FeatureBase was a cloud data startup. We built a realtime database powered by bitmaps.

    I was brought in to design the company's new SaaS UI. I also built out the bones of a design process (ceremonies, tooling, design system) and a research practice (processes and a core of friendly users).

  • Grafana

    Stage: Mid-sized
    Role: Designer
    Tools: Figma
    Tenure: Ongoing

    Grafana is a leading provider of open-source and cloud observability solutions.

    I initially worked with the as-code team, helping develop patterns for automating and provisioning Grafana. I later moved to the AI/ML team, where I do industry, technical, and customer research to shape how Grafana leverages these technologies.

Projects

  • AI/ML Visiontype

    2023

    A long-term product visiontype

  • FeatureBase

    2022

    A SaaS interface for a high-performance bitmap database

  • Nova Dashboards

    2019

    A general dashboarding framework for IT professionals

  • Log Manager

    2018

    A log collection and analysis product

  • Performance Analyzer

    2016

    A tool for analyzing timeseries data

Fun Stuff

Hiking

I do quite a lot of hiking in the Texas hill country. I also try to do a destination hike each year.

Game Design

I make simple, bespoke games intended for small groups. You can think of them as a set of processes for having fun.

Reading

I read a bit, and keep a journal of my books on Goodreads.