Two professions, one disposition.

The day work is agentic AI orchestration. At Zendesk, that meant designing JIRA story implementation workflows enforced by team-persona rules and guardrails, then extending the same pattern into a cross-tool delivery system that touches implementation, automated testing, and rollout monitoring. The measurable outcome was a 60 to 70 percent reduction in story review time, captured by sprint metric scripts and agent skills pulling live JIRA data. The qualitative outcome was a delivery loop that surfaced reliability signals from Datadog and PagerDuty inside the workflow itself, instead of after the fact.

The 24 years that preceded the AI work were spent at Gmail-class scale on backend systems that do not get to fail quietly: customer email ingestion, HTML decomposition, classification, routing, and ticket creation. Production incidents dropped by about 50 percent year over year on the team Andy led, settling at fewer than five per quarter, most of them traceable to upstream or downstream systems rather than introduced defects. Before Zendesk: a marketplace automation platform at Best Buy that enabled $40M plus in annual incremental revenue, and the Wells Fargo TOG Top Performer recognition for sustained technical excellence while modernizing legacy SOAP services to a RESTful Spring MVC architecture.

The current interest is multi-agent architectures framed as Monte Carlo Tree Search with a proper backup phase, the step most production agent systems leave out. The demo at /agents is where that work lives.

This is a second profession, not a hobby. Andy is a Lieutenant with Elk Creek Fire Protection District in Conifer, Colorado, certified as a structural and wildland firefighter and as an EMT-IV, with 5 years on the roster. The district covers steep, forested terrain along the 285 corridor, so it is all-hazards by necessity: calls range from medicals and motor vehicle accidents to structure fires, technical and rope rescue, and the wildland season that defines a lot of the operational year.

The work is included on this site because it is part of the week, not because it makes good copy. As a Lieutenant, the responsibility on scene is the crew on the apparatus and the call in front of it. That requires the same disciplines the engineering work does, run in a very different operating envelope: read the situation, commit to a plan, communicate clearly, and revise when the situation revises itself. The two professions stay distinct on this site except where the connection is real.

The trades are not a pivot. They are the same disposition expressed in a different medium: pay attention to the substrate, do the prep work, and leave the joint cleaner than you found it. The handyman work serves the neighborhoods around the 285 corridor and the Denver foothills. The woodworking is built-ins, furniture, and finish carpentry where the project earns hand-fit work and considered materials.

Both grew out of decades of doing this kind of work on Andy's own properties first, then for neighbors, then on a small enough volume to keep it real rather than industrial. Lead times are honest. Estimates are specific. The job is finished when it is finished.

The practice is intentionally small, which means some engagements are a mismatch by design:

• Heavy front-end product design work that is mostly visual rather than systems-shaped. The bias here is backend, platform, and orchestration.
• Pure prompt-engineering retainers without a real delivery surface attached. The interesting work sits in the workflows the prompts run inside.
• Full kitchen and bath remodels, additions, or anything requiring a general contractor's license. Andy will recommend a GC who works the same corridor.
• Production carpentry on short turnaround. Hand-fit work has lead times. Ten of something tomorrow is the wrong shop for it.

The fire and EMS roster is current. Engineering history is available in long form on the resume; the timeline entry below is pulled programmatically rather than duplicated by hand.