The technologist who never stopped building.

A second job next door at the Town Crier in Norton, then the kitchens of Silver Lake Country Club — prep and breakfast cook, carving stations in a coat and tie, hundred-plate weddings, walk-in coolers, dumpster duty. At eighteen, out on his own and paying his own rent.

Vocational electronics at Kent Roosevelt put analog, digital, and integrated circuits in his hands at the lowest level. For fun, he built a relay-router "clicky box" from 555 timers to switch the neon and stereo in his car. The builder instinct, fully formed before graduation.

Into the building where music, theater, journalism, and broadcast all converged. He soldered and patched thousands of connections — video, audio, data, control — drew the systems in AutoCAD, and taught himself AMX control programming. A mentor who'd written code for NASA started him on assembly and software.

Designing liquid-crystal eyewear: hand-laying vias and traces, programming PIC microcontrollers in raw assembly back before friendly compilers existed, soldering prototype boards small enough to live in the temple of a pair of glasses. He built a magnetic lithium-ion clip-on charger that was years ahead of its moment — then turned down a full-time offer to keep building at Kent State.

The university libraries gave him his start in IT support. Active Directory, group policy, file shares, software deployment — and a pager that sent him running toward every fire on campus. The beginning of the IT career that would eventually take over everything.

Thousands of feet of cable from the truck to the field. College football and basketball replay across the Midwest — some of it on ESPN3 — plus cage-fight MMA and live televised weddings. Replay op, technical director, camera shader, CG, audio, sometimes director. Whatever the show needed, he could be. (He also turned down a job wiring the LED scoreboard in the Cavs' arena.)

Handed a brand-new, all-digital television studio and told to make it run. Three-to-five shows a day, a nightly live newscast for the county, even live election coverage. He wrote Python to automate the control room, rigged Skype-over-4G live shots with homemade mic and IFB cables, and ran fiber to the arena to switch basketball games from across campus. He ran all of it for the better part of seven years.

When Uber switched on in Akron in late summer 2014, he was already behind the wheel — a blue 2014 Ford Fusion, tinted windows and neon lights, ferrying riders to clubs, bars, and every kind of shenanigan in between. A year and a half of extra money, great stories, and a few genuinely scary ones. Then a couple of tax seasons ran the real math on the deal, and he parked it. He kept the stories.

With a family to support, he moved fully into IT for a college — and made it anything but ordinary. He taught himself the learning-management system and supported every faculty member on it, digitized a speech course thousands of students took (cameras to Kaltura to graded online), imaged labs, fixed a museum's kiosks, and built Energetic Alpha, an app that teaches kids to trace their letters.

From his master's onward, he kept being handed a classroom — and kept saying yes. Videography and Avid certification in journalism; a student feature film he helped cut into a whole; Python-and-Django web programming for multimedia storytelling; computer-aided manufacturing at the mills; and creative coding in a projection cave he built himself. Six-plus courses across four disciplines, all teaching the same thing: put the tool in someone's hands and help them make something real.

Nine years leading IT for 21+ departments across 19+ buildings — the whole span of the liberal arts. He cleared years of technical debt, championed HPC and Open OnDemand, built a multicloud, hub-and-spoke environment, and supported the research that helped push the university to R1. He built the LIBERTAS Liberty-statue project. Eventually the college reorganized itself around the way he'd been running it.