AI EdTech founder · Cybersecurity leader · Startup Advisor · Builder of practical, more secure AI experiences

I’m the founder of VibeVersity, where I’m building a community of creators, entrepreneurs and AI enthusiasts that want to learn by doing, not bookmarking. It's a community for tech-curious people looking to level-up, without going back to school. My creative work sits at the intersection of AI engineering made simple, cybersecurity, and creator-first hands-on product building.

• Build simple and practical AI learning experiences that lead to deployed, adopted and attention grabbing work
• Bring security and privacy safeguards into AI projects from the start = 'more secure'
• Help professionals and teams turn AI curiosity into useful, repeatable workflows

• OWASP Phoenix: Led the chapter for more than a decade, organizing community meetups, free security training and ethical hackathons across the Phoenix metro area. OWASP Phoenix
• Meetup communities: Organize AI Security, Privacy, and Governance for 1,250+ members and Central Cybersecurity Meetup for 1,300+ members.
• DEF CON CMD+CTRL CTF: Earned five podium finishes as part of a five-person team—1st place in 2016 (108 teams) and 2019 (198 teams), plus 2nd place in 2017 (226 teams), 2018 and 2021. Awards listed on LinkedIn
• Public speaking: “GUARD-Rails: Automating Detection and Response at GitLab” at the 2023 Mandiant mWISE Conference in Washington, D.C.
• Media: Silicon.fr interview on AI-amplified threats, prompt engineering and modern authentication risks

I stopped measuring progress by how much code I could write by hand. In 2024, I completed a six-month, hands-on AI certification program at Arizona State University, where I trained models and used Python libraries to solve real-world problems. Moving quickly required us to accelerate development with AI coding assistants. Since then, I’ve found that vibe coding with AI can match the output quality of some of the best human programmers at speeds we simply cannot match, though often at the cost of durability, scalability, and security. That foundation now helps me direct AI-assisted development with purpose instead of spending my time engineering ephemeral primitives. I’ll leave that to the principal engineers.

Vibe coding gives me more time to focus on the parts of building that matter most: shaping useful ideas, solving real problems, sharing what I learn, and helping other people create something customers use every day. At the core of it all, everything starts with the end user, and we should all be customer obsessed.

My favorite ASU AI project was the SMiShing & Scam Detector. Send it a suspicious text or screenshot, and it assesses whether the message is likely a scam while explaining the warning signs in plain language. I built it for people like my mom—because security tools are most valuable when they are understandable and easy to use.

VibeVersity is a community of creators, entrepreneurs and AI enthusiasts that want to learn by doing, not bookmarking. It's a community for tech-curious people looking to level-up, without going back to school. Projects focus on hands-on learning, meaningful projects, with security and privacy safeguards built in.

A multilingual SMS scam-detection prototype combining zero-shot NLP, OCR, rule-based signals, and an interactive Gradio interface.

A team machine-learning project exploring imbalanced healthcare classification, threshold tuning, ROC AUC, and a Gradio prediction interface.

An analysis of public congressional trading disclosures, sector activity, and market patterns using Python and Jupyter notebooks.

• Applied AI: AI foundations, model training and evaluation, NLP, Hugging Face, LangChain, Gradio, and AI-assisted development
• Anthropic: Claude, Claude Code, Anthropic API, Claude Agent SDK, Claude Skills, and Model Context Protocol (MCP)
• OpenAI: ChatGPT, Codex, OpenAI API, Responses API, and Agents SDK
• Data and engineering: Python, pandas, scikit-learn, TensorFlow, Jupyter, API integration and testing, GitHub, GitLab, and AWS

• Leadership and operations: Field CISO, security strategy, global security operations, detection and response engineering, security logging, trust and safety, and operational resilience
• Offensive security: red teaming, penetration testing, application and API security, static source-code analysis, threat hunting, and social-engineering testing
• Threat management: cyber threat intelligence, incident response, emerging-threat and vulnerability programs, security testing, investigations, and technical audit coordination
• Governance and measurement: security program design, PCI and regulatory compliance, KPIs, KRIs, capability metrics, and risk-informed prioritization

• Startup advising, strategic partnerships, executive customer enablement, community building, talent development, and cross-functional leadership
• Practitioner education, AI fluency, curriculum design, product strategy, and rapid prototyping
• OWASP community leadership and practical security training

• Growing a community through VibeVersity
• Creating courses for creators, entrepreneurs and vibe coders
• Building practical learning paths for secure AI adoption
• Helping others turn ideas into useful tool and live projects that get attention
• Sharing good vibes with anyone paying attention

The best place to learn more or get in touch is vibeversity.com.

A little GitHub plot twist
For much of my career, my development work lived in GitLab and other solutions. In 2026, I decided to move to GitHub. This activity graph tells the latest chapter, not the whole story. So, I'm enjoying seeing the green squares fill up. I hope yours also bring you joy.