I bricked my mom's computer
I was about twelve. The family computer was a Dell Dimension E310 and I had decided it needed a bigger hard drive, which it probably did. I got the drive in. Then I decided it also needed Ubuntu. That part did not go well, and for about a week we didn't have a computer. My mother remembers this differently than I do.
I've never really stopped. The machines got more expensive and the stakes got higher, but the instinct is the same: take it apart, find out why it works, put it back together slightly better. Most of my career has been that instinct pointed at other people's problems.
Queens
I grew up in Queens, the son of Jamaican immigrants. My mother was relentless about college in a way I didn't fully appreciate until much later.
Teaching came first
In high school — from 2012 until I left for college — I was a peer health educator at Community Healthcare Network in Brooklyn. We ran more than thirty workshops for teenagers in underrepresented neighborhoods across New York City, and I wrote the scripts for the PSA videos. We talked about keeping a clean presence online, about safer sex and teen pregnancy, and about how to plan for a future you can't see yet.
Thirty workshops. I was fifteen.
This is the part people get backwards. Presenting and teaching get described as skills I picked up in sales engineering. I started before I could drive, for an audience considerably harder to hold than any room of executives. Same job, smaller budget.
My first video was about keeping a clean presence on the internet. This website is, I suppose, the director's cut.
Code Now
Senior year of high school I got into a program called Code Now. That's the actual answer to “how did you get into this.” Taking apart the Dell made me curious; Code Now made it a thing a person could do for a living.
Stony Brook
I got there through EOP — the Educational Opportunity Program, which SUNY schools run for students who are promising but underprepared. It meant showing up five weeks before everyone else for summer classes, and being handed counselors who stayed with me for all four years. I don't think I'd have finished without it.
Then I worked the whole way through. Web developer for the Communications & Marketing department for two years. Operations assistant at the Student Activities Center for most of the rest. Resident assistant for a year. Teaching assistant. Programming chair and then vice president of the National Society of Black Engineers, and vice president of the NAACP chapter. The university newspaper ran a piece about students working full time while studying full time and put me in it, which I found funny, because it hadn't occurred to me that it was notable.
I don't romanticize any of that. I'd have liked more sleep. But I learned to run my own time at nineteen because nobody else was going to, and that's been worth more than any single class I took.
Two of those jobs matter more than the rest.
The web development internship at the Office of Marketing and Communication ran for two and a half years. I rebuilt old pages as responsive ones, published three sites through the CMS, and then — because staff kept getting stuck on the same things — started making training videos and running the YouTube channel we put them on. That was 2016. Nobody told me it was called developer relations. It took another eight years for the job title to find me.
And in my last semester I went back to EOP as a success coach. The program that got me through the door, and I was on the other side of the table, with three students of my own. All three got better at this while I had them. I have never been prouder of anything on this page.
By senior year I had job offers and a different kind of math to do. A documentary crew was following several of us that year — they were making a film about whether college still moves people up — and I told them, out loud, that I had about ten mouths to divvy up. That was true. It's still roughly true.
What I said to them then is what I'd still say now:
“We're going to change our communities, but if you're only letting a few of us in, that change is going to happen very slowly.”
Money
I grew up doing a kind of math most of my classmates never had to do. Ten mouths to divvy up. Two jobs and a course load. By the time anyone asked me what I wanted to be, I'd already spent years thinking about how money actually moves through a family.
So personal finance isn't a hobby I picked up — it's the first subject I ever studied seriously, and the one I keep coming back to.
- BAG Ventures — limited partner and angel investor since 2022. Early-stage, mostly AI and infrastructure.
- atxworkshops.com — founded June 2026. Small-group workshops, in Austin, in person.
- blackbitcoiner.com — founded September 2026. Built to help Black folks build wealth through bitcoin accumulation.
In 2018 I told a documentary crew that if you only let a few of us in, things change slowly. I'm not going to connect those dots for you.
What I'm actually good at
Explaining things. Standing in front of a room. Asking the question everyone else was too polite to ask. Going three levels deeper than the conversation strictly required, because I want to know.
In practice: I'm the person who notices that twelve customers are hitting the same wall, and then builds the thing that removes the wall. Sometimes that's an SDK. Sometimes a CLI. Usually it's documentation nobody wanted to write.
Jamaica, specifically
Both of my parents are Jamaican, which is where the work ethic comes from, and the laughter, and the conviction that you can make something good out of almost any situation. It's also where my standards for food come from, and those are not negotiable.
Stewed chicken. Oxtail with butter beans. Rice and peas. Breadfruit and festival, eaten on a beach. Fish and festival on a beach in Jamaica is the best meal available to a human being and I'm not interested in debating it.
Soccer
I played forward. Ronaldinho, Drogba, Rooney — Barça, Chelsea, United. I watched whoever was most worth watching. Ronaldinho over everybody, because he played like he was enjoying himself, and that turned out to be the thing I value most in anyone's work.
Saturdays
A walk on a trail or through a park. Breakfast made at home. I cook for my wife and my daughter, which is currently my favorite part of the week.
I'm a first-time dad, and it's rearranged my relationship with time in a way nobody adequately warned me about. I have far fewer hours and I waste almost none of them.
Where I am
Austin, Texas. Not planning to leave.