About

The homepage says failure was not an option where I learned to make decisions. This is where that standard comes from.

People read the first chapter and the second chapter as two careers. They were not.

I served in the United States Coast Guard and spent roughly fifteen years in the fire service, including Aircraft Rescue and Firefighting, structural firefighting, and wildland firefighting. I served as a Lieutenant and later Fire Chief, and paramedicine ran through those same years. I also became a nationally recognized instructor and conference speaker on prehospital traumatic brain injury care.

Those environments taught me to make decisions with incomplete information and real consequences. Preparation was not separate from performance. Training was not ceremony. You planned for the bad day before it arrived because discovering your failure modes during the event was already too late.

Software started before that chapter ended. In Aircraft Rescue and Firefighting, I built the tools the operation did not have: firefighting inventory and equipment management, inspection tracking, FAA Part 139 airfield reporting, and internal NOTAM tracking with historical records. I learned the technology because the systems needed to exist.

Healthcare, lending, reliability, financial data, and money movement came later. The systems became larger and the consequences became less immediate, but the discipline carried forward: understand the operation, make failure explicit, prepare for conditions that are not ideal, and build systems that can remain correct when those conditions arrive.

The full progression, including the systems that worked, the ones that did not, and the decisions that changed what was possible afterward, is documented in Experience.

Today I work as a senior software engineer with principal-level scope in financial technology, while continuing to write about architecture, engineering judgment, reliability, and technical leadership here.

My formal education includes an A.A.S. in Paramedicine, a B.A. in Organizational Communication from Montana State University Billings, and an A.A.S. in Criminology from Tarrant County College. I am also an Eagle Scout.

I founded XRiley to apply the same thinking commercially through architecture, technical leadership, and software delivery for organizations dealing with systems where fragility has real consequences.