About
Dublin → San Diego → San Francisco → Sacramento. The drift you watched on the home page is a literal trace of how I got here.
01
I was born in Dublin and came to the United States at age five, landing in San Diego with my family in the late 1980s. The first years of school happened there, under a very different sky than the one I'd started under. Childhood in California is a strange kind of double-exposure when you remember another country underneath it, you grow up paying close attention to where you are.
That attention never really switched off. I've spent the rest of my life thinking about places: how they're shaped, how they're mapped, who gets to decide what the map shows. Which, in retrospect, makes a great deal of sense.
"I've spent the rest of my life thinking about places, which makes a lot of sense in retrospect."
02
San Francisco is where the instinct found a name. I did both my BA and MA in Geography at San Francisco State University, and somewhere in the middle of that the discipline tipped from "the thing I'm curious about" into "the thing I do." Eighteen years of professional GIS practice followed, through public-sector and infrastructure work, into the senior end of the craft.
Today I'm Lead Principal GIS Developer for the City of Sacramento's IT Department. At a senior level the work is less about making individual maps and more about architecture: designing the spatial data systems other teams build on, mentoring the people who run them, and writing the tooling that turns a one-off analysis into something repeatable. The best days are the ones where I remove a class of problem rather than solve a single instance of it.
A senior portfolio justifies itself by selection, not volume. The work I show here is chosen the same way I try to choose problems: for the thinking, not the thumbnail count.
03
For years I've taught at SF State (Python programming, an introduction to ArcGIS Online, and an introduction to the ArcGIS API for Python), and I've taught open-source GIS at UC Davis. Teaching keeps the fundamentals honest; you can't hand-wave a concept to a room of students who are about to try it themselves.
Lately a lot of that same curiosity has turned toward AI, and especially open-source AI. It feels like a continuation of the instinct that pulled me toward open-source GIS twenty years ago: a preference for tools you can open up, understand, and build on, rather than ones you simply rent. I treat it as a working public lab notebook more than a product pitch.