The Data Sorcerer
You come to me with a question.
I'll give you a vector by close of business,
and a magnitude in two days.
// who I am
I spent 20+ years at Verizon doing something most data people don't get to do: staying long enough to actually know the data, instead of just querying it.
There's a difference between a wizard and a sorcerer. A wizard studies — meticulously, slowly — and eventually hands you a beautiful, complex dashboard that only they know how to read. A sorcerer already has the power innate.
I was in the room when the data was built. I don't need weeks to study it — I need minutes to draw on it. That's where the nickname came from. A VP I worked under, both of us D&D players, needed a title that actually described what I did. Not "analyst." Not "wizard." Sorcerer.
Give me a fire drill, and I'll tell you by end of day whether your promotion is statistically significant and worth continuing. Give me two more days, and I'll tell you exactly how many dollars it's worth. Speed first, precision close behind — not the other way around.
// how I work
Every spreadsheet I hand off comes with the SQL behind it. If I'm on vacation, someone else just runs the query. No bus-factor-of-one nonsense.
I was one of the first people tapped to work in Verizon's new BigQuery environment, and instead of waiting for requirements, I started building the "Lego blocks" — small, reusable, minimum-viable components that later became the foundation the rest of the department's systems were built on. That's the real trick behind fast answers: the backend work is already done before you ask the question. By the time there's a fire drill, I'm not starting from zero — I'm just assembling pieces I built months earlier.
Most of my career moves weren't applications — they were people I'd worked with reaching out years later because they remembered what I could do.
I use Claude Code daily. I know where it earns its keep, and I know where a deterministic, boring answer is still the right one.
// outside the spreadsheets
When I'm not knee-deep in data, I'm usually knee-deep in a different kind of system. I'm a "spreadsheet sim" guy at heart — Out of the Park Baseball, Battletech, Rule the Waves 3, and lately Football Manager. If it has depth, numbers, and a strategy layer, I'm in.
I also sim race — not particularly well, but I once beat NASCAR Hall of Famer Bobby Labonte in an iRacing event. (In fairness, he got wrecked by someone else four laps in. I'll take the win anyway.)
I lead an alliance in a mobile strategy game, where — no surprise — I built a dedicated planning channel so our generals could actually execute complex plans instead of freezing under pressure. Old habits.
Above all, I'm a present father to four sons and a husband who made a promise a long time ago that work would never come before family dinner — and 25 years later, that's still true.
// portfolio
Work in progress — projects added as they're built.