About

Hey, I'm David. I live in Apex, NC — right in the heart of the Research Triangle — and I've spent the better part of my career at Lockheed Martin working at the intersection of cloud infrastructure, data analytics, and automation. My day-to-day pulls across FinOps, cloud engineering, DDoS mitigation, and making sense of large-scale systems that really don't want to be made sense of.

On the observability and data side, I've been deep in Splunk for years — certified Power User, and still reaching for it when I need answers fast. More recently I've been watching the AI and agentic tooling space the way most people watch football: intensely, with opinions, and occasionally yelling at the screen. I was at Dynatrace Perform 2026 following the agentic AI thread and it hasn't left my head since. I run experiments off a Raspberry Pi at home, including the Claude Code session that actually runs this blog — post to Discord, site deploys. That's the whole CMS.

When I'm not in a terminal, I'm probably at the smoker. Low and slow pork — ribs, shoulders, whatever needs a few hours and some cherry wood. I'm not a competition guy. I just like the process: managing a fire, being patient, feeding people. Turns out that maps pretty well onto the rest of what I do.

march 2026 — these didn't last long

Outside of work I've put real time into connecting students with industry. At Penn State Beaver, I served on the advisory board and built a student-to-employer mentorship program from scratch — pairing industry professionals with students to create internship pipelines and professional networking opportunities that wouldn't have existed otherwise. I ran that program for three years and watched it actually work: students landing real opportunities, not just resume line items.

Now I bring that same energy to the Apex High School Academy of Information Technology (AOIT) Advisory Board — a NAF-affiliated program that connects local industry to a four-year IT curriculum covering design, programming, and real-world career readiness. I help shape how emerging tech like AI gets woven into what students actually learn, and I mentor kids who are figuring out what a career in tech even looks like. The fundamentals still matter, no matter how fast the tooling moves.