Hi, I’m Jackson
I’m a software engineer in Philadelphia who spent ten years keeping production infrastructure running before moving into software. I bring an operator’s instinct to 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 record of how I think about engineering — the principles I work by, the decisions behind the projects, and what I’d do differently next time.
Find your way around
- Engineers of any level — start with how I approach engineering and the projects that put it into practice.
- Hiring managers — the experience page has the full career history and skills.
- Everyone — I’m always happy to talk shop, trade notes, or help someone earlier in their career. Email me or find me 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.
- 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.