Self-taught software engineer, ~30 years in. Started on QBASIC at 11, shipped my school's website at 15, and have been in the trenches ever since — startups through acquisitions, e-commerce at scale, financial technology platforms, and now AI automation as the through-line.
Currently Director of Software Engineering by day and founder of Clark's Consulting on the side — helping small and mid-size teams ship practical AI agents, RAG systems, and workflow automation that earns its keep. Not pilots. Not slideware.
Based in Des Moines, Iowa. Faith and family first.
What I'm currently building, testing, and writing about.
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Bake-offs and benchmarks for agent memory — what actually retrieves, what hallucinates, where local 13B models hold the line vs. frontier. Building durable memory layers that survive context windows and model swaps. |
Multi-agent workflows with explicit orchestrator/subagent decomposition, verified fan-out, and trust-but-verify validation. Less "autonomous mystery box," more "engineered pipeline that ships."
MCP Gateway: Agentic SSO → |
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Custom MCP servers, skills, hooks, and harness config. Thin abstractions over model APIs so swapping Opus 4.7 for Sonnet 4.6 for Haiku is a config change, not a refactor.
Thin Abstractions for Model Churn → |
CRM pipelines, support triage, sales follow-ups, document workflows. Practical AI that replaces manual data entry and freeing teams to do work only humans can. |
| 2023 — Present Now |
Director of Software Engineering — Lenders Cooperative Founder — Clark's Consulting Architecting scalable FinTech systems (Django, Vue, AWS), leading engineering teams, and on the side, helping clients ship AI automation that pays back inside 30–60 days. |
| 2016 — 2023 ~7 years |
Lead → Principal Engineer — Denim → Denim Social First employee after the CEO. Built the team, the culture, and the platform from the ground up. Grew from an InsurTech startup through multiple mergers and acquisitions into a social media compliance and advertising platform serving enterprise financial services. Architected a serverless GraphQL backend on AWS Lambda, built all CI/CD and ops, and shipped ad-distribution across LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and X at scale. |
| 2014 — 2016 ~2 years |
Tech Lead — Hy-Vee Overhauled e-commerce and payment systems for a high-traffic retailer. Serverless solutions, modern architecture, focus on reliability and UX. |
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genomes_agentic_os Reusable AI operating systems for client & internal workflows — Notion control planes, agent rules, workflow specs, automations, context packs, and run logs. |
darkforge-memory-battle Adversarial harness for benchmarking RAG & agent-memory systems — the experiments behind the Memory Bake-Off series. |
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mongodb-atlas-data-api-sdk Node SDK for the MongoDB Atlas Data API. Used in production by a handful of teams. |
dsmtech Open directory of tech companies and startups in the Greater Des Moines area — community-maintained. |
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facebook-nodejs-business-sdk · 593★ Contributor on Meta's official Node.js SDK for the Marketing APIs. |
serverless-openwhisk · 141★ Contributor — Apache OpenWhisk support for the Serverless Framework. |
Languages · TypeScript · Python · Node.js · Go · JavaScript · SQL | Frameworks · Astro · Django · Vue · React · Express · Next · GraphQL | Data · Postgres · MongoDB · Redis · Pinecone · Qdrant | Cloud · AWS · GCP · Azure · Cloudflare · Render · Fly | AI · Claude (Opus / Sonnet / Haiku) · GPT & Codex · local Llama / Mistral · MCP · LangChain · LlamaIndex
Clark's Consulting funds something larger than itself: a faith-based homestead outside Des Moines, where we plan to homeschool our kids in the rhythms of the land — and open our doors to people recovering from addiction or homelessness. Every project ships another stone toward that foundation.