What I've Actually Done

I spent a decade in software engineering — graduated first in LSU's College of Engineering, built products, led teams, became VP of Engineering.

Along the way, I built something else: a practice of weekly 1:1s built around structured reflection — what I called a Career Development Journal — with the engineers and managers I worked with. Not a framework I read about. One I built from scratch, with real people, over years.

What actually happened, honestly — not every outcome was clean, and I'd rather tell you that than oversell it:

• One engineer went from junior to senior, promoted, in under a year.
• A separate engineer was struggling as a mid-level developer. Instead of pushing harder in a role that wasn't fitting, we found an adjacent role that actually matched his strengths — he moved into it and succeeded greatly, promoted to senior there. He messaged me, unprompted, two months after I'd left the company: "I did most of my career under your guidance."
• A third went from mid-level developer to tech lead.
• Not everyone's story ended that clean. Some of what I saw — real burnout, real crises — I couldn't fix with a journal and a 1:1.

Why I Can Actually Help With This

Because I had to learn to see my own patterns too, not just other people's.

Knowing how to help others didn't mean I could see my own blind spots. I've built and walked away from more directions than I want to admit — each one a version of the same pattern, seen only in hindsight. What changed wasn't finding one more clever idea. It was learning to see the pattern underneath all of them, in my own life, the same way I'd already learned to see it in other people's.

I'm not a therapist or a licensed counselor. I'm someone who's done his own work — and is still doing it — who sees what people carry without knowing it. Doing your own work is the only way to learn to see it in someone else. That's the credential, not a license.

How I Actually Work

I ask questions most people don't get asked. I use your own words back to you until the pattern is undeniable. It's uncomfortable sometimes. It works.

Closing

If a good year on paper still doesn't feel like the right direction, that's worth looking at directly — not fixing with a new job or more grit, just actually seeing.