I've spent 20 years building for the web, and 15 of those years teaching it as a college professor of Communication Design and Web Development. Today I lead the WordPress team at Wake Forest University, ship AI-native products on the side, and have built a personal productivity stack on top of Claude Code. Tech Productivity Lead is the role that finally names both halves of what I've been doing.
20+ years of web engineering. 15 years as Associate Professor of Communication Design and Web Development at Virginia Western, building curriculum that bridged academic theory and industry practice. Today I'm a senior web developer at Wake Forest University leading the WordPress team. Tech Productivity Lead isn't a stretch, it's the synthesis of two careers I've been running in parallel since 2004.
My personal Claude Code setup includes custom skills, subagents, hooks, MCP servers, and a memory system that keeps Claude oriented across hundreds of conversations. I've wired Claude into my project tracking, calendar, Slack, email, and my own CLIs, so it can act on my behalf, not just answer my questions. I don't use Claude Code as a chat window, I use it as an operating layer.
I ship constantly across two demanding practices: I lead the WordPress team at Wake Forest University, and I run an active freelance business that keeps me accountable to real clients on real deadlines. My 15 years in the classroom give me the other half: I know how to turn that work into curriculum that engineers actually use, written by someone they recognize as a peer.
Two artifacts that exist today, that you can read in 60 seconds.
An internal library of AI and Claude Code study guides for my colleagues at Wake Forest. Built, hosted, and maintained on my own initiative as a senior web developer, not assigned. This is what curriculum-shipping looks like in practice.
View the library →
A curated AI news digest. Policy, tools, models, perspectives, filtered for signal. I publish it because staying current in this space is a daily discipline, not an aspiration. Tech Productivity Leads need to live in the news cycle. I already do.
Read the latest issue →Most users stop at the prompt. I've built a layer above it: skills, agents, hooks, and integrations that turn Claude into a daily operating system. Three pieces of that stack, each teachable on its own.
Over the last year I built a unified work hub for myself: a personal project tracker that holds my projects, tasks, goals, meeting notes, status reports, deliverables, and client-facing communication in one place. I access it through a UI. Claude accesses it through a CLI I also built. The dual interface is the point, my agent and I see the same work from the same angle, so context never has to be re-explained, status never has to be re-summarized, and deliverables never have to be hunted down. Running three jobs across many clients gets dramatically lighter when your collaborator already sees what you see.
Persistent memory files organized by type. SessionStart hooks that surface the right context every time Claude opens. A personal constitution loaded into every session so my collaborator stays aligned with my values across hundreds of conversations. A Communicator MCP that lets Claude reach me on Telegram when I'm away from the keyboard. Every enterprise customer asks "how do I make Claude remember our org?" I've solved a harder version of that for myself, across three domains.
I built Slope Status with Claude Code from the chairlift on my phone, then wrote about the experience in my WFU study guide library so colleagues could learn what shipping with Claude actually looks like. One artifact, both halves of the role, roughly the same week. The pattern I'd repeat at scale.
Native apps for the Apple ecosystem. DeacLocal is a macOS tool I built for my team to manage local WordPress development environments. Rewinderator runs on iOS and macOS for video practice. Claude Code lets me ship full native apps without specializing in Swift or Tauri.
Production static sites, fast, content-driven, hosted on Netlify or S3. Claude Code scaffolds them, iterates on design directly in code, and keeps the build pipeline clean.
Design exploration in code. I sketch mockups in real HTML and CSS when the goal is to test interaction and rhythm, not just visuals. Claude Code makes the iteration loop fast enough that I can show three options instead of one.
API design, data migrations, queue workers, integration glue, the unglamorous infrastructure work that holds institutional systems together. Claude Code remembers the schemas, follows the conventions, and writes the boilerplate so I can stay focused on the architecture.
Status updates, executive briefs, project retrospectives, technical writeups for non-technical readers. Claude Code reads my work hub, drafts the report, and lets me focus on what to highlight instead of how to phrase it.
I lead the WordPress team at Wake Forest, where we maintain a multisite installation with custom themes and a portfolio of internal plugins on AWS. I also operate a freelance WordPress practice on the side, building custom themes and plugins for client sites. Claude Code is part of how I modernize legacy code, ship new features, and keep codebases coherent across teams and clients.
Two decades of building for the web, with a freelance practice running the whole time. From 2004 to 2019 I was also an Associate Professor of Communication Design and Web Development at Virginia Western, teaching the next generation of builders while I kept shipping. Today I'm a senior web developer at Wake Forest University, leading the WordPress team. The teaching instinct didn't go anywhere when the title did, it just shows up now in the study guides I write for colleagues, the AI digest I publish, and the way I help my team work with Claude. I write and record original music, and have a family at home, because the same instinct that drives the engineering (build the system that removes the friction) shows up in every domain. I'm applying for the Claude Code lane because it's the first role I've ever seen that names, out loud, the work I've been doing in parallel for 20 years.
The best next step is the Loom. Five minutes, the stack in motion. If you'd rather talk, my calendar is open.
