About Me

I have made a conscientious effort to keep the opposing party and the minor children involved in these legal proceedings out-of-focus of the book wherever possible, so although the most integral details of who I am come from my role as a father, I will leave those details aside. Instead, I’ll try to summarize the details about me which could best explain the “how” and “why” this book and site exist:

I graduated from the University of Iowa with bachelor’s degrees in Psychology and M.I.S. and have spent my career in I.T.  I started working as a developer for the University of Iowa’s Business College while attending the university and later moved into systems engineering. I’ve worked in large financial institutions as well as smaller software companies, managing teams of architects and engineers while remaining a technical contributor.  I’m currently Chief Dev Lead for the I.T. Automation group at Freddie Mac.

My first passions have always been psychology, philosophy, English, and the sciences. I didn’t get into information technology until what would have been my senior year of college in 2001. I completed my undergraduate coursework for a psychology degree and was taking some graduate level courses in the second semester of my junior year. I wasn’t exactly sure how this passion would transition into a career yet, so before joining a lab at the university I studied abroad in Spain for a semester and took a semester off to contemplate a career trajectory based on psychology.

I was somewhat concerned about the limited income potential for a psychology graduate without a focused path. I saw that my friends who were graduating with M.I.S. and Computer Science degrees were doing well for themselves, and with the help of my then-roommate  I started exploring programming and web development to see if a technology-related degree would suite me. Fortunate for me, I found that I enjoy both the logic-puzzle aspect of programming, as well as the artistic aspect of design/multimedia work.

My first job out of college was for a small company where I was brought on as a web developer/system admin all-in-one. I learned systems administration as I worked and attained professional certifications in Microsoft, Citrix, Cisco, VMware, AWS, etc. I was an early adopter of virtualization by the time I started a new job in 2007, I started the “P2V” conversion of the software company’s physical infrastructure into virtual machines.  The efficiencies gained from virtualization were obvious, and soon thereafter this small software company which had been selling its software as an on-premises installation saw an opportunity to add a revenue stream for Software-as-a-Servcie (SaaS), and so we started to architect and deploy a scaleable infrastructure model that could be managed through automation by just a handful of engineers. By 2011 I was Director of Systems and Infrastructure, but maintained my engineer/architect “hat” as that’s where my passion remained.

I’ve worked at a number of firms since that software company, staying in the Enterprise space with companies sizing at $2B+ revenue. I’ve shifted out of a managerial position and into a technical contributor-only position as a direct result of the legal matter which is the focus of this book. Although I had to take a lesser role, and even a reduction to part-time for  2021, I’ve been able to participate and lead an effort to improve Freddie Mac’s business resiliency posture through I.T. automation, because I started architecting end-to-end business resiliency for Sox-compliant applications way back in 2010.

It not an exaggeration to say that the business resiliency posture of Freddie Mac, and therefore the housing market as-a-whole, has assumed prolonged risk directly due to the malfeasance in this one divorce matter.  This is the fundamental basis for why this book exists. It’s not just that the court system secretly operates with the routine malfeasance that I witnessed; it’s that it seems to have no bounds. It doesn’t “compute” with me that malfeasant deeds on display can add risk to a $75 billion-a-year quasi-government-owned entity, objectively endanger the well-being of minor children, and extort a government regulated employee using a malfeasant act which is in-scope of the employee’s regulator.

If this is “just the way it works” in this country, I need to know (and so should everyone else).