From Army Officer to Software Founder
What fifteen years in the Army National Guard taught me about leading engineering teams under pressure.
I've spent fifteen years as a Field Artillery officer in the Florida Army National Guard while building a software career and founding startups. People ask how those two things connect. The answer is duller than they want: both are mostly deciding with incomplete information and delivering anyway.
Mission command maps to engineering leadership
The Army teaches mission command. You give people the intent, the constraints, and the authority to execute, then you stay out of the way. The alternative is a leader who owns every decision and becomes the bottleneck for all of them.
Engineering works the same way, and for the same reason: the person closest to the problem has information you don't. Clear outcome, explicit boundaries, let the team solve the how. When I've broken that rule it was always because I wanted the answer to be mine.
Emergency response teaches incident management
I coordinated Guard response through five hurricanes and two presidential inaugurations. That work taught me how to keep moving once the plan is already wrong, and how to sound calm on the radio while doing it.
Production outages run on the same clock. The teams that handle them well are the ones where nobody escalates their own panic into the channel.
The founder parallel
Founding or co-founding eight SaaS products taught me that starting a company and running a battery share one skill: allocating resources you don't have enough of. Never enough time, money, or people.
You pick the one thing that matters this week and you say no to the rest. Artillery officers call that priority of fires. Founders call it focus.
What veteran-owned actually buys you
Red Leg Dev is veteran-owned, and I keep that quiet on purpose. It buys you no discount and no guarantee, and it's a bad reason to hire me over someone better. What it means is that I spent a long time somewhere showing up prepared was the baseline and quitting mid-task wasn't on the menu.
It also fixed my definition of “mission-critical.” The term belongs to the system that has to work at 3 a.m. with nobody watching it, not to the sprint demo on Thursday.