Two professions, one disposition.

The day work is agentic AI orchestration. At Zendesk, that meant JIRA story workflows enforced by team-persona rules and guardrails, then a cross-tool delivery system spanning implementation, automated testing, and rollout monitoring. It cut story review time 60 to 70 percent, measured by sprint scripts and agent skills pulling live JIRA data, and pulled reliability signals from Datadog and PagerDuty into the delivery loop instead of surfacing them after the fact.

The 24 years before the AI work were spent at Gmail-class scale on systems that do not get to fail quietly: email ingestion, HTML decomposition, classification, routing, and ticket creation. Incidents on the team Andy led dropped about 50 percent year over year to fewer than five a quarter, most traceable to upstream or downstream systems rather than introduced defects. Before Zendesk, a Best Buy marketplace automation platform that enabled $40M plus in annual incremental revenue, and a Wells Fargo TOG Top Performer award for modernizing legacy SOAP services to RESTful Spring MVC.

The current interest is multi-agent architectures framed as Monte Carlo Tree Search with a proper backup phase, the step most production agent systems leave out. The demos at /demos are where that work lives.

This is a second profession, not a hobby. Andy is a Lieutenant with Elk Creek Fire Protection District in Conifer, Colorado, certified as a structural and wildland firefighter and an EMT-IV, with 5 years on the roster. The district covers steep, forested terrain along the 285 corridor, so the work is all-hazards: medicals, motor vehicle accidents, structure fires, technical and rope rescue, and the wildland season that defines much of the operational year.

It is on this site because it is part of the week, not because it makes good copy. On scene as a Lieutenant, the responsibility is the crew on the apparatus and the call in front of it. The disciplines carry over to the engineering work in a very different operating envelope: read the situation, commit to a plan, communicate clearly, revise when the situation revises itself. The two professions stay distinct here except where the connection is real.

The trades are not a pivot, just the same disposition in a different medium: mind the substrate, do the prep, leave the joint cleaner than you found it. The handyman work serves the neighborhoods around the 285 corridor and the Denver foothills. The woodworking is built-ins, furniture, and finish carpentry where the project earns hand-fit work and considered materials.

Both grew out of decades of doing this kind of work on Andy's own properties first, then for neighbors, then on a small enough volume to keep it real rather than industrial. Lead times are honest. Estimates are specific. The job is finished when it is finished.

The practice is intentionally small, which means some engagements are a mismatch by design:

• Heavy front-end product design work that is mostly visual rather than systems-shaped. The bias here is backend, platform, and orchestration.
• Pure prompt-engineering retainers without a real delivery surface attached. The interesting work sits in the workflows the prompts run inside.
• Full kitchen and bath remodels, additions, or anything requiring a general contractor's license. Andy will recommend a GC who works the same corridor.
• Production carpentry on short turnaround. Hand-fit work has lead times. Ten of something tomorrow is the wrong shop for it.

The fire and EMS roster is current. Engineering history is available in long form on the resume; the timeline entry below is pulled programmatically rather than duplicated by hand.