I think a lot about how things are built to serve people and whether they actually do.
That question shows up everywhere for me. In the towns I explore with a camera on weekends, trying to understand why some main streets feel alive and others don’t. In the organizations I work with, where the gap between process and people is often where quality quietly breaks down. In the daily routines we build that either support a good life or just fill time.
I’m a quality engineer and solution architect by trade, working at the intersection of complex systems, teams, and the humans they’re meant to serve. But the way I think about quality has never been about efficiency for its own sake. It’s about fitness for purpose, and the purpose I care about is people thriving, not systems performing.
The lens I keep returning to
A town that strips itself down to pure economic efficiency – chain stores, maximum throughput, nothing left to linger over – often ends up being a place nobody really wants to be. The “inefficient” details are frequently what make a place worth living in: the coffee shop where the owner knows your name, the park that generates no revenue but gives people a reason to slow down, the farmers market that maintains a community’s relationship with where its food comes from.
Organizations work the same way. The teams that ship the best work aren’t always the ones running the tightest processes – they’re the ones where people understand why the work matters, where feedback actually flows, where the infrastructure supports good judgment instead of replacing it.
I’ve started calling this quality for people. Not quality as a floor you achieve by eliminating failure, but quality as a ceiling – what becomes possible when the systems around us are genuinely designed for human flourishing.
What I’m building here
This site is where I work that idea out in public.
Some of it is field research. On weekends I take my camera to small New England towns — Amesbury, Newburyport, Rockport, places like that – and I try to read them the way a systems analyst might. What’s working here, and who does it serve? Where are the third places? What does this town seem to think it’s for? Those observations end up as Field Notes: place-based essays that use the town as a lens for thinking about how we build things for people.
Some of it is slower, more reflective writing. Essays that try to connect ideas across domains – urban design, organizational behavior, technology, the rhythms of everyday life. The kind of thinking that takes a few drafts and benefits from sitting with a coffee shop window view.
And some of it is professional. I work with organizations on quality engineering strategy – not just test coverage and tooling, but the harder questions about how quality thinking gets embedded into culture, how teams communicate across silos, how you build systems that people can actually trust and maintain.
A bit more on me
I’m based in Newburyport, MA – which means I’m surrounded by good raw material. I read a lot, mostly at the intersection of urban thinking, systems design, and organizational behavior. I’m currently working through Chuck Marohn’s Strong Towns writing and Ray Oldenburg’s work on third places, both of which are shaping how I think about civic infrastructure and what it has to teach the organizations I work inside.
I write here because thinking in public is a discipline. It sharpens the ideas, creates accountability to the work, and occasionally connects me with people who are asking similar questions from different angles. If that’s you, I’d genuinely like to hear from you.