A Salty Vet started as a long-standing email nickname that apparently hit a little too close to home during an Army exercise. The irony was not lost on me. Senior leader chats can be packed full of memes, sarcasm, and dark humor, but the moment a system states the obvious, suddenly everyone wants to clutch their pearls.
So the name stuck.
And honestly, it fits.
I have spent nearly two decades in the Army, and I am now winding down that chapter while preparing for whatever comes next. Over the years, my foundation has been built on mentoring and developing leaders, geospatial engineering, GIS architecture, systems maintenance, and a growing education path focused on information technology, coding, and cybersecurity.
At my core, I like learning hard things, breaking them down, and teaching them in a way that actually makes sense. Whether it is building servers, working with maps and data, experimenting with AI tools, gaming, coding, cooking, or figuring out how technology can solve real problems, I am always looking for the next system to understand and improve.
That same mindset is also behind Flavor by Design, my recipe and cooking platform. I love to cook, share recipes, and help people who want to get better in the kitchen. Cooking is a lot like technology: once you understand the fundamentals, the process gets less intimidating, the mistakes get easier to fix, and eventually you stop surviving the recipe and start designing the outcome.
This platform is where all of that comes together.
A Salty Vet is professional, but not sanitized. Honest, but not reckless. Technical, but not boring. It is a place for leadership lessons, technology projects, AI experiments, GIS work, gaming, PC and server builds, food, recipes, and whatever else I decide to drag across the finish line with caffeine, sarcasm, and questionable sleep habits.
The Army gave me plenty of experience, a healthy distrust of buzzwords, and enough dark humor to survive PowerPoint briefings that should have been war crimes.
Now I am using that experience to build, teach, document, cook, create, and explore the next phase of life after the uniform.
