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About Me

I’m the person who reads the 400-page report, the budget appendix, and the footnotes to the footnotes—and then hands you back something you can actually finish over a cup of coffee.

Before Hold My Latte, my life was software, spec sheets, and project management. I spent years in the technology world as a manager, writer, programmer, and hardware–software builder—someone companies brought in when a project wasn’t working, documentation was failing, or engineers needed a translator who could turn complex systems into language real people could actually use. I wrote manuals, help guides, and internal documents for large engineering teams, often serving as the emergency project fixer when things were sliding off track.

Whether it was a mainframe, a VAX system, a major server, or a simple desktop PC, I was in it. That breadth of experience is exactly why I see the tech world the way I do—and why the “tech bros” I write about don’t surprise me. I’ve lived in their ecosystem long enough to recognize the patterns. I was there in the early 1990s, when personal computing was still being invented in real time and the digital world was more frontier than industry. The people who now dominate the tech landscape came to power in a world I helped build, long before it had household names or billion-dollar empires.

In 2018, a car accident and a traumatic brain injury blew up the neat version of my life. Recovery rewired a lot of things, but it also stripped away any patience I had left for vague explanations and “trust us, it’s complicated.” I came out of it with less tolerance for nonsense and a lot more urgency about what’s happening to ordinary people in this country.

That’s how Hold My Latte was born.

This publication sits where politics, economics, technology, and everyday life collide. I write about:

How policy actually hits the ground—on families, workers, and communities, not just on charts.

The “extraction economy” we’re all living inside, where time, health, and trust are treated as raw materials.

The slow, quiet ways systems drift toward cruelty: surveillance, privatization, budget tricks, and legal fine print most people never see.

Along with my technology background, I have deep study in sociology, history, psychology, and anthropology, which means I tend to see our world through several lenses at once. And because I also run a genealogy company, I spend a great deal of time sorting truth from myth—seeing firsthand the kinds of stories people tell, and the lies they’re willing to maintain just to stay on the “right side” of polite society.

I come at this like a mix of investigator, technical writer, and very stubborn citizen. I’ve spent years digging through archives, court records, and government data—on everything from ICE and deportation patterns to gun violence, and the long shadow of institutions that were never meant to be humane. I’m used to following paper trails, building timelines, and asking who benefits from the stories we’ve been told.

What you can expect here:

I don’t do hot takes. I do slow, sourced, heavily argued pieces that you can hand to a skeptical relative and say, “Here. Start with this.” I write for the busy, smart person who shouldn’t need a law degree or an economics minor to understand their own country. I care about moral clarity, but I refuse to ask readers to “just believe me.” If I make a claim, I’ll show you where it came from.

If you stay with this newsletter, you’ll see certain themes repeated on purpose: how power hides inside contracts and software, how budgets tell the truth long after speeches lie, how “private solutions” quietly replace public obligations, and how all of that adds up to a country that feels less and less like the one we thought we lived in.

I’m a writer, a former technical fixer, a data-and-archive obsessive, and someone who believes that if people had been told the truth earlier, a lot of what we’re living through now would look very different.

In the future, there may be livestreams—or at least recorded videos—for moments when something needs to be said directly. I’m also looking to bring additional voices into this publication—writers who share the same mix of outrage, clarity, and moral urgency. People who can help readers make sense of their own emotions while giving them the data, history, and language they need to hold their ground at that family-holiday-dinner battlefield we all know too well.

My promise to you is simple: I will treat your attention as something worth protecting. I will do the heavy reading, show you my sources, and tell you plainly what I think is happening—so you don’t have to say, ten years from now, “If we had known this, it would have changed everything.”