Hello, I’m James. I’m originally from Chicago but I moved to San Francisco where I currently live with my partner and our plants since 2019.

I’m a security engineer at Discord currently working on detection and response engineering. Prior to joining Discord, I was a security engineer at Cloudflare. I really enjoy investigating compromises, researching threat actors and targeted attacks, and finding ways to get ahead from a detection, prevention, and response perspective.

My superpowers are intuition, curiosity, and investigative mindset.

Hobbies

Here are just a few of my favorite things to do outside of work:

  • Go on photo walks. I enjoy learning about street photography and taking photos of moments that catch my eye or make me feel a certain way. Oftentimes, it means raw/not staged, and of random buildings, items, or people.
  • I enjoy learning about music production. Admittedly, I’ve not done much with this but I have some gear at home and every now and then try to learn a bit. I have nothing to show for it (yet), though.
  • I really like the outdoors and disconnecting when I can. I especially love to hike and be surrounded by nature. It brings me peace. Lately, I’ve been trying to travel more and submerge myself in other cultures. There’s always something new that I learn and appreciate after a trip.
  • I love to eat more than I do cooking these days. I have a very strong appreciation for the little things, such as how certain flavors play well together (or don’t), the experience of eating in general (e.g. does it fall apart? is it too messy?), and its overall presentation.
  • I also like to read non-fiction and self-improvement types of books.