Hi, I’m Jackson

I’m a software engineer in Philadelphia. Before moving into software, I spent ten years running production infrastructure, and that experience shaped how I write code: I care about correctness, testability, and systems that are invisible when they work and recoverable when they break.

This site is less a résumé than a look at how I approach engineering: the principles I work by, the thinking behind my projects, and what I’d do differently next time.

Where to start

Engineers: my engineering principles and the projects where I’ve applied them.
Hiring managers: the experience page has my full career history and technical skills.
Everyone else: I’m always up for talking shop or helping out if you’re earlier in your career. Email me or connect on LinkedIn.

Impact

24 scripts(47 call sites) now running on the internal standard library I built for my team
$400K+annual outsourcing cost eliminated through automated patching
−70%monthly vulnerability exposure from the same pipeline
40–60% → 99.99%availability on a 1,200-server platform our ops team stabilized
24h → 4hrecovery time objective on a hybrid-cloud backup rebuild

Context for each number is on the experience page.

How I approach engineering

Reliability is a feature — systems shouldn’t need heroics to operate.
Automation must reduce risk, not create it — automating a bad process just produces bad outcomes faster.
Modernize incrementally — improve what exists first; rewrite only when the evidence supports it.
Governance should enable engineers — make the compliant path the easiest path.
Testing comes before trust — confidence should come from evidence, not familiarity.
Documentation is engineering work — if the next engineer can’t operate it, it isn’t finished.

Read the full principles, with examples →

Current focus

Bringing test coverage and CI quality gates to existing codebases
Reliable, unattended API integrations — Microsoft Graph, GitHub, identity platforms
GitHub Enterprise governance and developer experience that doesn’t slow teams down
AI-assisted development with explicit research, planning, and review checkpoints
Observability and reliability engineering

Selected work

Projects & case studies — the problem, the constraints, the decision, and what I learned.
gh-baseline — a read-only gh extension that audits GitHub repositories against a tiered security baseline, built in Go from a manual audit of my own repositories.
Keel — PowerShell modules for unattended automation, CI-tested on Windows PowerShell 5.1 and PowerShell 7: bounded HTTP retries and Graph-first mail that won’t resend after an ambiguous failure.
Email alignment checker — a scheduled GitHub Actions workflow that monitors this domain’s SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records.

Outside of work you’ll find me skiing, cooking, on a yoga mat, or suffering through another Ferrari strategy call.