Aviation Nerd

Born in Key West, raised in St. Pete — close enough to the Space Coast that launches were just part of the weather. I watched shuttles go up as a kid, the kind of thing that's so normal when you grow up with it that you don't realize until much later how strange and enormous it actually was: a building-sized machine standing on a column of fire, visible from the backyard.

That never fully wore off. I still walk outside to catch SpaceX arc across the sky, and I still get the same small jolt every time — the delay between the light and the sound, the reminder of just how far away and how powerful the thing is. Most people my age outgrew it. I just got more launches to watch.

FlightRadar24 lives on a second screen more often than I'd admit in a job interview. There's something genuinely calming about seeing the whole sky rendered as a system — every contrail a flight number, every flight number a tail, a route, a place someone's trying to get to.

It's the same thing I love about networks and good software: invisible infrastructure, quietly doing an absurd amount of coordinated work so that the people relying on it never have to think about it. Air traffic is the original distributed system, and it's been running at a scale and reliability the rest of us are still trying to copy.

Window seat, no exceptions. The climb-out is the best part of any trip — the moment the city tilts away and becomes a circuit board, every street a trace, every block a component. I will fight for that seat.

The list right now: Japan, Iceland, and Portugal, in roughly that order. Each for a different reason — the trains and the food, the landscape and the impossible light, the coastline and the unhurried pace. The window seat is non-negotiable for all three.