The arc

I’ve been a writer (nearly) my entire life. I was the kid who read the dictionary and thesaurus for fun and turned short-story assignments into chaptered novels. Eventually my love of words shaped my career as a Security Specialist. Documentation wasn’t a maligned side task. It was my bread and butter.

For years, I translated deeply technical concepts into clear prose: passkeys, zero-knowledge architecture, the principle of least privilege, quantum threats to modern authentication. I built a career on making difficult concepts accessible.

Then I was promoted to Security Engineer.

Now I build the systems I used to explain. The tools shifted from R and Markdown to Go, CI/CD pipelines, and AWS. And now I think about a system not just as the writer documenting it, but as the engineer responsible for it.

Lately my work is mostly AI security engineering: multi-model pipelines that review code for vulnerabilities, and the compressed maps that let them reason about a codebase too large to fit in any context window. Part of that is designing around nondeterminism, because models rarely produce the same output twice.

I’m a skeptic by training and temperament, which turns out to be the right disposition for this work. Confidence and correctness are not the same thing, and models are remarkably bad at telling them apart. So I build the adversarial checks, the second opinions, and the audit trails, because AI has made me faster, but it has never once replaced my judgment. I wrote more about that on my blog.

I live in Ontario, Canada, with my son and our rescued bully, Sky.