Ask.
Wrong password.
Solution Architect.
Drummer.
Father.
Detroit die-hard.
Australian.
These aren't different versions of the same person. They're the same thing at different volumes.
I was 14. My lead guitarist — older, working, living — said "check this out" and put on Meshuggah's Nothing. I didn't have words for it. Still don't. Time signatures that shouldn't work. Accents in places that shouldn't be accented. Polyrhythmic architecture that broke every rule I knew about music — and was better for breaking them.
That's the same brain that does solution design. The same instinct that hears a contact centre problem and starts mapping the architecture underneath it. Complexity isn't the obstacle. Complexity is where the interesting work lives.
I've played drums my whole life. Played stages. Still play. Not a career — a practice. The same discipline that makes me learn a Meshuggah riff until the polyrhythm locks in is the same discipline I bring to work. No shortcuts to precision.
Metal shaped my values. Earned, not given. Heavy is not the same as loud. Precision isn't the enemy of intensity — it's what makes intensity land.
I didn't grow up in Detroit. I'm Australian. And somewhere along the way I chose Detroit — or Detroit chose me. The Red Wings and the Pistons. That's it. That's the obsession.
There's something interesting in the question of why. Most people inherit their teams. Their dad watched a certain team, so they watch that team. I didn't have that. I found these teams on my own and decided they were mine. Identity you choose is different from identity you inherit. It costs more. It means more.
Detroit is a city that built things and got hit hard and kept going. That resonates. The Wings in the '90s were the best team in hockey and nobody outside of Michigan seemed to care. The Pistons in 2004 beat the most stacked roster in NBA history on pure system. That's the kind of thing I pay attention to.
Counter-Strike is a strategy problem that happens to involve shooting. You're reading the map, reading the economy, reading what the other team thinks you're going to do, and then doing something else. It's the same architecture brain — identify the constraint, find what nobody else is looking at, solve backward from the outcome. I've played IGL. Calling strategy mid-round under pressure is not that different from calling architecture in a room full of stakeholders who all want something different.
Everything above — dark, heavy, intense, precise. And then: dad.
My kids are my best friends. Full stop. The greatest thing I'll ever do is be their father — not in a greeting-card way, in a this-is-genuinely-true way. I've been on stage, in enterprise architecture meetings, in the pit. None of it compares.
People want to make this a contradiction. It isn't. The same intensity that drives everything else is what I bring to being a parent. The wildness and the groundedness aren't opposites. They're the same thing — one just has smaller shoes.