I've spent 20 years in financial market infrastructure - the plumbing that moves trillions daily while everyone argues about whether Bitcoin is money. Now I'm trying to make carbon markets actually work, which means convincing people that spreadsheets and pinky promises aren't a verification system.
Building supply chain traceability and carbon tracking on Hedera DLT. Turns out "we promise this metal is sustainable" doesn't cut it anymore, and someone has to build the boring infrastructure that makes claims auditable. That someone is apparently me.
Mass accumulation of niche expertise, mostly. 10 years at CME Group building derivatives systems. Then LSEG, where I ran digital asset innovation across the London Stock Exchange, LCH clearing, and FTSE Russell - which sounds impressive until you realize "innovation" in financial infrastructure means convincing committees that change won't break everything.
Somehow ended up co-authoring EU crypto regulation (MiCA) and advising the Bank of England on their digital pound. I'm not entirely sure how that happened, but I've learned that if you stay in a room long enough and occasionally say something useful, people assume you're an expert.
I use it constantly. I'm not precious about it. It's a tool - like a very fast intern who's read everything but understood nothing. The trick is knowing when it's confidently wrong, which is often. Garbage in, garbage out. Always has been.
Most of my work lives in private enterprise repos or behind NDAs. What's here is home lab stuff - MCP servers, automation experiments, things I built at 2am because I wanted them to exist and nobody else was going to do it.
Computer Science and Spanish Linguistics from Illinois State - a combination that's never once been useful in the way my career counselor promised. Chicago kid, now London. Still can't find good Mexican food.