Not the resume you would draft on purpose.

It started behind the door of a speakeasy. The No Name Bar in Boulder, a 50-seat room, and the music was my job. I booked it six nights a week and grew it from $200 nights into $3,000 nights, and the whole thing ran on relationships I built one artist at a time. Gregory Alan Isakov played secret shows there to work out new material. Nate Cook and The Yawpers held a monthly residency. The Samples played the room, then came back as solo headliners. Nathaniel Rateliff sent me a demo, I booked him for $50 and free food, and he sells out Madison Square Garden now. The job was simple to say and hard to do: read one person and give them what they actually needed.

A few years later I carried that into a classroom. I went to Kampala, Uganda and taught six subjects across K–12 at a small international school, and when the school had no social studies curriculum I wrote one from scratch. Every student passed the IGCSE writing exam. Teaching turned out to be the same job as booking, only harder: take something a person finds difficult and make it land for the specific person in front of you.

That is the skill the rest of this is built on. I came back to Eugene and have taught ELA for seven years, currently 6th and 8th grade, and I led the district's adoption of ELA power standards: reviewing every standard, deciding which ones actually mattered, and rewriting them in language a student could use. A classroom also teaches you to read an adoption curve early, who takes to a new thing immediately, who needs to watch it work first, who digs in against it. That read travels to any team rolling out something unfamiliar.

The asset was never the booking or the lesson plan. It is the read on one person, and the knack for making a hard thing make sense to them.

Now I build custom AI tools, and the work needs exactly this and rarely has it. I built a private investor one clean box when an expensive terminal and a stack of chatbots could not give him a straight answer about his own holdings. I turned an advocate's white papers into a California energy case that could survive a hostile committee, fact-checked, modeled, and mapped against its opposition. More on that. I have sat with school superintendents on the buy side of AI adoption, where the gap between a demo and real use is where the value disappears. None of that is really about the code. I build the system, then I teach the person who has to live with it how to run it. That second half is teaching, the job I have done for years, and it is the half most engineers skip. I do not hand a system over and walk away.