About
Background
Seventeen years in professional kitchens, then a career change that was not optional.
I cooked from 2002 to 2019 — line cook to kitchen manager and executive chef, including a semester teaching culinary arts in the Hospitality and Tourism diploma at what was then GPRC, and about a year of consulting for a restaurant owner after I came off the line. What I actually did all day was run an operation: budgets, purchasing, suppliers, scheduling, human resources, and the custom Excel systems I built to keep cost, staffing, ordering and waste under control.
I left the line in 2019 because I have Hajdu-Cheney syndrome, a rare connective-tissue disorder, and kitchen work stopped being sustainable. The next few years were a couple of surgeries, a few injuries, and being the stay-at-home parent. I decided to learn programming. When AI crashed that party, I decided the better bet was to understand AI itself, and started building and shipping things in public. The useful half of the kitchen years transferred intact: decide what good means, write the standard down, and hold every plate that leaves to it.
What I do now is specify software and direct AI to build it — which is a real skill with real failure modes, and the difference between a working result and a plausible-looking one is entirely in the specifying, the reviewing and the refusing to ship. The design calls, the evidence rules and the judgement about what is good enough are mine, and so are the mistakes.
What I am good at
- Web
- HTML, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, custom WordPress themes, accessible UI, Git and GitHub
- AI-assisted building
- Specify, review, debug and ship; prompt and protocol design; editorial control over generated code; keeping a standard across long multi-session work
- Data & operations
- Custom Excel systems for inventory, sales, scheduling and budget tracking; research extraction with strict sourcing rules
- Leadership
- Kitchen management, remote supplier coordination, nonprofit board work, disability advocacy
- Writing
- Plain language for people who did not come for the jargon — patient-facing, nonprofit and technical documentation
Experience
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June 2023 – present
Board Member — Grande Prairie Residential Society
Created and publish the public website. I volunteer on the maintenance, marketing and special projects committees, and I am starting a fundraising committee — alongside outreach, planning and governance for accessible housing, including through the post-fire rebuild of Margaret Edgson Manor.
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March – December 2023
Caregiver — private client, Grande Prairie
Daily schedules, dietary routines, and medication timing.
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February 2002 – March 2019
Kitchen Manager / Executive Chef — hospitality operations, Alberta
Including Ric’s Grill, and instruction at GPRC (now Northwestern Polytechnic). Led kitchen teams, owned budgets and purchasing, coordinated suppliers remotely, and built the inventory and sales tracking systems the operation ran on.
Education & tickets
- Journeyman Chef
- SAIT, 2012
- B.Sc.
- Credits earned, 1999–2002
- Self-directed
- freeCodeCamp and related, plus daily AI-assisted build practice on live sites and personal side projects
- Also held
- Power Engineering 4th Class · Gas Plant Operator Levels 1 and 2
Practicalities
Based in Grande Prairie, Alberta, on Mountain Time — which overlaps most of the working day across North America. The work is remote and that is the only thing I need it to be. Open to work now.