A practitioner who went and got the proof.

Most software-engineering research is written by people who study systems from the outside. I spent thirty-three years inside them: architecting certified gaming platforms at IGT, rising from Principal Engineer to Chief Technology Officer at the fintech firm Figure, and most recently co-founding the embedded-finance startup Envoi as its CTO, leading engineering organizations as large as 105 people and holding more than 25 patents along the way. The knowledge that accumulates across that kind of career, in regulated domains under deadline, is real, hard-won, and almost entirely undocumented.

The PhD (Computer Science & Engineering, University of Nevada, Reno, 2025) was a deliberate move to fix that for myself first: to take what I knew in my hands and make it legible (citable, testable, teachable). My dissertation, From Practice to Process, did exactly that for API-first design. PhiDo Labs is the continuation of that move, pointed outward. The arc is not industry-then-academia; it is industry and academia, kept in the same loop on purpose.

A university lab comes with a department's agenda, a grant cycle's priorities, and a tenure clock's incentives. A consultancy comes with a billing model that quietly decides what gets studied. I built PhiDo Labs to avoid both: our research program follows the problems that matter in practice, and the work answers to whether it is true and useful, not to a funder's roadmap.

It is built to last across that independence. Whether PhiDo Labs has zero products or five, the through line holds: formalize what practitioners know, publish it where the field can find it, build it back into practice.

The knowledge-transmission problem is not evenly distributed. The formal channels that carry software-engineering knowledge (elite programs, conference travel, the protected time it takes to write) were never equally available. A great deal of the most valuable production knowledge is held by exactly the people those channels do not reach: practitioners without the credential, the network, or the runway to publish. When that knowledge never reaches the field, the field rarely counts it as missing, because it never saw it in the first place.

That is not a side note to this work; it is part of why the work exists. Lowering the cost of turning practitioner knowledge into rigorous research is, in the end, a question of whose experience counts as a source, and of who gets to push boundaries, open doors, and shape the field.