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Projects

National security and aerospace mission software, NASA public systems, open-source tools, and one product owned end to end.

Each case study separates the problem, the responsibility, and what can be verified.

01 / Jacobs · BlackLynx

Mission Software

Hands-on engineering and cross-program technical leadership: making mission software integrate, pass meaningful checks, and ship across internal and partner teams.

Jacobs · 2025–present

Read case study: Cross-program mission software

Staff Aerospace Software Engineer — implementation, cross-program technical direction, platform practices, and engineer development.

Problem
Independent services, inconsistent delivery practices, and integration risk across partner teams.
Contribution
Cross-program technical direction, shared interfaces, DevSecOps, integration, and engineer development.

Core program: ~12 repositories · 4 environments · ~6 engineers

Cross-team SAFe Agile. Core-program scale; broader influence is shared practices and coordination across additional aerospace efforts.

  • Python
  • AWS
  • Kubernetes

02 / Developer platforms · DevEx

Platform Engineering / Developer Experience

The engineering system is a product too. Independent tools shorten feedback loops, make policy executable, and expose operational behavior.

Open source · Independent engineering

Read case study: Engineering the feedback loop

Independent author and maintainer — tool design, implementation, tests, and documentation.

Problem
Slow feedback and hidden operational assumptions make software harder to ship with confidence.
Contribution
Built focused tools for local CI, prioritizing test gaps, and pipeline governance.

Inspect the source, tests, and usage documentation

Independently authored and maintained; public source is the evidence.

  • Python
  • Go

03 / Earth science · 2017–2025

NASA Platforms

Eight years connecting satellite data to the people who need it. Public search, flood mapping, and science publishing are the evidence.

Public flood map

NASA · 2017–2025

Read case study: Flood Mapping System

Lead Software Engineer — design, processing, and delivery on AWS.

Problem
Turn satellite imagery into flood products without a chain of manual processing runs.
Contribution
Led Python processing and containerized delivery on AWS, connecting imagery to a public map.

90.9% overall accuracy in the published system evaluation

Collaborative scientific result, not an individual engineering KPI. Software (Equal), GeoHorizons 2026.

  • Python
  • Docker
  • AWS

Public Find Data

NASA · 2017–2025

Read case study: NASA satellite-data search

LAADS DAAC / Find Data

Lead Software Engineer — web applications and delivery workflows.

Problem
Make a complex satellite archive searchable and orderable without replacing its existing interfaces.
Contribution
Find Data workflows and incremental delivery modernization with GitLab CI/CD, Helm, and Kubernetes.

5-step search-to-order workflow · MODIS and VIIRS access

Live public artifact. No query-time or user-growth claim.

  • Perl
  • Kubernetes
  • GitLab CI

Public Earth Observatory

NASA · 2017–2025

Read case study: Earth Observatory

Lead Software Engineer — web-platform development and modernization.

Problem
Support science editors and large imagery on a heavily used public publishing platform.
Contribution
Laravel and MySQL platform modernization, reusable editorial workflows, performance, and discoverability.

~1.5 million monthly visitors during this work

Historical platform scale, not traffic growth attributed to Karl or a current audience figure.

  • Laravel
  • MySQL

04 / Full-stack product ownership

Independent Products

From domain research and information architecture to editorial tooling, search, deployment, and ongoing operation.

Independent product · 2026–present

Read case study: The Dry Standard

Founder, designer, and engineer — end-to-end product ownership.

Problem
Alcohol level, production method, and taste are different facts. Listings usually collapse them, so non-alcoholic drinks are hard to compare.
Contribution
The taxonomy separates product identity, production classification, evidence, and tasting state. Editors author the source; publication builds a SQLite catalog that the Laravel application reads for search, comparison, and product pages.

Search, comparison, reviews, and editorial operations read one generated catalog.

Faceted browsing stays separate from curated, indexable category pages.

  • Laravel
  • SQLite
  • Vite

The foundation / Enterprise & healthcare

Earlier Work

Reliability, operational visibility, and domain-heavy applications were the work long before aerospace.

InformedDNA PlatformInformedDNA · 2016–2017 A Laravel-based case-management platform connecting counseling workflows, documentation, and billing. Case study FiniumManaged security · 1999–2005 Multi-tenant Java software for provisioning, monitoring, incident management, and security operations. Built for enterprise managed-security environments where reliability and operational visibility were critical. Case study

For the complete chronology, education, and certifications: Resume.