I came into this the long way around. I started out teaching martial
arts — up to a dozen classes a day, every age and every skill level —
and that is where I learned the thing that still runs my work:
people don't learn from what you tell them, they learn from
what they practice. Retail, mobile sales and call centers
followed, and in every one of those rooms I ended up being the person
who trained everyone else.
The first thing I do with any process is look for how to make it better
— but I won't propose a single change until I understand it completely.
Learn it inside and out, then improve it. That order is why the things
I build tend to hold up.
What I do now
At NYU Langone Health I design and run new-hire and upskilling programs
across Hospital Billing, Patient Access, Accounts Receivable and
Customer Service — and I build the machinery underneath them. The Excel,
SharePoint and Power Automate trackers the training team runs on are
mine: scheduling, attendance, assessment scores, learner readiness,
program outcomes. I've trained and coached more than 4,000 people.
Then I started building software
I built my own AI assistant, Zareli, and took it to a
live deployment. Its first specialist reads spreadsheets properly — it
tells you what is structurally broken, why, and what to do about it. I
own the architecture, the product decisions and the verification; AI
coding tools write the implementation under my direction.
The same habit runs through everything here: every tool is driven
through a headless browser and checked against assertions before it
ships. I don't publish what I haven't tested.
The rule I build against
One idea sits under all of it: competency, not
dependency. Most AI is designed to make you need it more. I
wanted the opposite — something that hands the work back to you a little
more capable than it found you.
That isn't really about software. It is the same job as standing in a
classroom: you are finished when people don't need you any more. A
trainer who makes themselves indispensable has failed at the actual
assignment. It is why every tool here has an Edit button instead of a
support request.
The part people ask about
I don't have a college degree. I'd rather say that plainly than let it
sit in a gap on a resume. What I have instead is a body of work you can
open right now, a product in production with real users, and seven years
of getting people competent at things they found hard. I'm working
toward DP-900 and PL-300 because I'd rather add the credential than
argue about it.
