Behind the Lines

Yes. Tech Between the Lines is just me. There's no team, no rotating contributors, no editorial staff. Every article, every newsletter issue, every social post comes from one person sitting down and working through what he actually thinks about something.

That's worth saying plainly because it's not always obvious from the outside. A consistent publishing schedule and a clean site can look like infrastructure. It isn't. It's just someone who cares enough to keep showing up.

The honest answer is that people kept telling me I should do something like this.

For years, friends, colleagues, and people I worked with would come to me with tech questions and walk away saying something like "you should do tutorials" or "you explain this stuff really well." I was always the person in the room who had a take on why a product decision made sense or didn't, or what was actually going on underneath an announcement everyone else was treating at face value. Apparently that came across.

TBTL is where that energy finally landed. It's not a tutorial site and it didn't turn into a YouTube channel. It turned into this: analytical writing about Apple and the tech industry, shaped by someone who has spent a career thinking carefully about how technology actually works and why it matters. The people who kept saying "you should put this somewhere" were right. So I did.

The short version: I've done almost every job in IT.

I started out doing bench-level hardware repair and diagnostics, the kind of work where you learn fast that technology fails in very specific and often very unglamorous ways. From there I moved through network support, help desk, Tier 2 escalation, and systems administration before working my way into senior engineering. My current role is a Senior Desktop Engineer position managing a large-scale Windows and Microsoft endpoint environment, which means overseeing thousands of devices, managing vendor relationships, leading hardware lifecycle decisions, and being the person escalations land on when something complicated breaks.

That career arc matters because it's not a straight line from "studied IT" to "senior engineer." I have context at every layer of the stack, from a user calling in frustrated about a frozen screen all the way up to the infrastructure decisions that put that device on their desk. That breadth shapes how I read the tech industry, even when I'm writing about consumer Apple products.

I do. Every article on this site represents my thinking, my research, and my editorial judgment. I have a point of view shaped by working across nearly every level of the technology field, and that perspective shapes what I cover and how I cover it. The analysis here is mine.

Because I genuinely love Apple products and find the company fascinating to analyze. That's the honest answer.

My professional life is Microsoft and Windows. But I've been an Apple consumer for a long time, and the thing that keeps pulling me back to writing about it is the gap between the story Apple tells about itself and the reality of using its products in the real world. That gap is almost always interesting.

My IT background gives me a useful frame for it. I understand deployment constraints, ecosystem lock-in, and what "it just works" actually means when something has to work reliably for people who don't want to think about it. That perspective shows up in the writing even when the article is squarely about a consumer product.

Not a news wire. I don't chase every story or try to be first on anything. If I'm writing about a news item, it's because I have something specific to add to it.

Not affiliated with any vendor, platform, or PR arrangement. I don't accept payment for coverage. I don't let advertisers shape editorial decisions.

Not a publication with a team behind it. When you read something here, you know exactly whose judgment produced it.

Yes, and I'd rather be upfront about it than vague.

AI is part of my workflow, but it functions as a precision instrument rather than a content machine. Over a significant amount of time, I've built and refined a set of custom writing frameworks that encode my voice, my editorial preferences, my structural habits, the phrases I refuse to use, and the kinds of arguments I find worth making. These aren't generic prompts. They're the product of real iterative work, built to get AI assistance thinking the way I think.

What AI does in my process: helps me develop structure, move through a first pass, and pressure-test ideas. What it doesn't do: generate takes I haven't already formed, report facts I haven't verified, or decide what's worth covering. The editorial judgment is mine.

AI also generates the images on this site. I'm not a visual designer, and AI tools let me produce original, relevant imagery that I couldn't otherwise create. Every image concept is mine. The execution is AI-assisted.

Everything that goes out under the Tech Between the Lines name gets reviewed by me before it's published. I want to be clear eyed about that too: I'm human, and I've made mistakes. Incorrect information has slipped through. When I catch it, I correct it. If you spot something wrong, I'd rather hear about it than not.

I take the AI slop problem seriously. The internet is filling up with content that sounds like writing but reads like averaging. I have no interest in contributing to that. If something goes out under this name, it reflects a point of view that actually exists.

Every single one. No exceptions.

If there's a review on this site, I have physically held, used, and tested that product before a word got written. I don't do spec-sheet reviews. I don't repackage press release bullet points into paragraph form and call it hands-on. If I haven't lived with something long enough to have a real take, I don't publish a review of it.

This matters because too many reviews are really just marketing summaries with a star rating attached. That's not useful to anyone making a real purchasing decision.

Glad you noticed. I am so sorry.

This is a known condition. The clinical term, as best I can describe it, is "saw a really clean Ghost theme and now I can't stop thinking about it." It strikes without warning, usually at 11pm, and the recovery window is short.

I genuinely believe in consistency as a publishing principle. I have written, in actual published articles, about the importance of brand coherence. And then a new theme drops with a nice typographic treatment and a subtle card layout and somehow it's two hours later and I'm pushing CSS changes to production.

The content doesn't change. The voice doesn't change. The site's reason for existing doesn't change. The coat of paint, occasionally, does. I'm working on it. Progress is slow. The Ghost theme marketplace is not helping.

Because the interesting part of almost every tech story isn't the announcement. It's what the announcement reveals about the decision-making, the tradeoffs, the priorities, and the implications nobody put in the press release. Reading between the lines isn't skepticism for its own sake. It's just paying attention.

Yes. If something I wrote was wrong, you have a tip, you want to push back on a take, or you just want to say something landed, I want to hear it. You can find me on social or reach out through the contact page. I read everything, even when I'm slow to respond.