Hello, I’m Gail

The professional half

I work at the intersection of subsea engineering, safety systems, and industry standards — the part of the job where you translate complex technical behavior into rules that are clear enough to follow and strong enough to matter. These days that includes HIPPS standards development, subsea architecture design, and modernizing the engineering tools that bring critical design work into the digital age.

Some of the work involves helping teams understand why a requirement exists and how to apply it when the guidance runs out. It’s adjacent to shaping the standards themselves — both require deciding what counts, what doesn’t, and how to explain the boundary in a way that survives real‑world use.

The rest is negotiation. A standard, guideline or specification that is technically flawless but operationally unrealistic never survives, and one that is easy to adopt but does not improve safety is worse than none at all. Finding the wording that threads that needle is the job, whether the subject is pressure protection, subsea systems, or the digital frameworks that support modern engineering design.

I’ve always loved programming — not in the abstract, but in the very specific sense of telling a machine what you want and watching it do exactly that. My background in automation never really left me, and somewhere along the way I picked up the things that make building tools even more fun: full‑stack development, machine learning, the kind of AI work that starts with curiosity and ends with a model quietly doing something useful.

Most of the time, the ideas come from frustration or the desire to make it better. A workflow that’s clunky, a calculation that takes too many steps, a design review that needs a better way to visualize what’s going on. I like the moment where you stop complaining about it and start writing code. There’s a particular satisfaction in watching a small script or a web app make someone’s day easier — especially when it replaces a process that used to involve deep dives to look things up, spreadsheets, or heroic patience.

I don’t write software for the sake of software. I write it because engineering design deserves better tools than it usually gets, and because sometimes the fastest way to improve a workflow is simply to build the thing you wish existed. It’s the same impulse that drives standards work: make the hard parts clearer, make the repetitive parts lighter, and leave people with something that helps them do their job well.

The other half

Everything else here is what I do when nobody is asking me to do something.

Learning mahjong is my latest obsession. I am slow, inconsistent, and occasionally brilliant by accident — which is exactly the right pace for a game that rewards patience more than bravado. Home automation scratches a different itch: I use Home Assistant to automate things around the house that did not strictly need automating, but it’s hard to resist the satisfaction of watching a tiny piece of logic make everyday life smoother.

I still write code for fun — small web pages, smart tools, little AI experiments that start with curiosity and end with something unexpectedly useful. It’s the same impulse behind quilting and photography: take raw material, shape it, and hope it becomes something beautiful, artisitic, and hopefully functional. I’m not an expert in any of it, but I enjoy the process of making things that didn’t exist before.

I also love the beach in a way that feels inherited. I grew up in Pensacola; my husband is from Trinidad. Between the two of us, sand and saltwater feel like home. I was lucky enough to live and work in Trinidad for a while, and I brought back a permanent affection for the spices, the cooking, and the music — especially the kind that takes over the island during Carnival.

None of these things look related, but they overlap more than you’d think. Whether it’s a quilt block, a Home Assistant automation, a digital image, or a half‑working mahjong strategy, the fun is in figuring out how the pieces fit together — and enjoying the moment when they finally do.

This site: The hummingbird and hibiscus are mine.