About
It all started in a helicopter over Germany.
Before the software, before the systems work, before any of it: Aaron was a UH-1H helicopter repairman and crew chief, logging hundreds of mission hours across two tours in Germany. The camera he carried on some of those flights was his own. Watching the oil pressure and the wires was the job.
The helicopter years
Aaron served as a UH-1H helicopter repairman and crew chief, logging hundreds of mission hours. He was permitted to bring a camera on certain flights — it started over Germany — filming while simultaneously monitoring oil pressure and watching for wires.
The photograph is his own. That is a Blackhawk, not the aircraft he crewed: he shot it over the Tigris from the door of his own Huey, on a mission he was working. Doing both at once — minding the aircraft and running the camera — is where both halves of this career start.
Newspapers, then two TV stations
After the Army, Aaron started in media as a graphic designer at two newspapers — Gannett News-Press and the Cape Coral Daily Breeze. From there he moved into broadcast, working as a Broadcast Graphic Designer & Animator for Waterman Broadcasting, producing for ABC-7 and NBC-2 in Fort Myers. He has been shooting, producing and editing video for broadcast, cable and the web since 1997.
Websites, from Flash to a CMS of his own
The web ran alongside all of it from the start. Aaron was building business-card websites in Flash from 1997, and by early 2001 he had put up a database-backed site running on a content management system he wrote himself — two years before WordPress existed, and for the same reason anyone builds their own: nothing off the shelf did the job yet.
An agency of his own, and teaching
From 2003 to 2010, Aaron was Director of Business Development at Random Art House, a full-service advertising agency he helped run — video production, 3D animation, marketing growth strategy, media placement and displays, full time and then part time. Alongside that, from 2005 to 2010 he taught web design, 3D animation and digital portfolio courses at Southwest Florida College, later splitting his time between instructor and the college's own marketing team.
From advertising into systems
2010 to 2013 was the turn toward software: as Director of Advertising and Lead Web Developer at Riddle's Jewelry, Aaron delivered a custom ERP, inventory allocation system and data-sharing utilities across 57 retail stores, alongside the TV and digital advertising work.
Architecting a Fortune 300 platform
From 2013 to 2021, at TDG — then a small insurance brokerage — Aaron built Direct to Policy Holder from the ground up: a custom InsureTech ERP and insurance-management platform, built on Symfony, Drupal and .NET, that became the core system the business ran on. He grew and managed the engineering team behind it, implemented secure DevOps pipelines, enforced PCI compliance, and authored the company's Data Protection Plan. That platform is part of why TDG was an attractive acquisition target: it was acquired by A.J. Gallagher, a Fortune 300 company, and Aaron led technical integration and continuity planning through that acquisition. He also kept producing video through this period — event loops and web videos for two national publications, Massage Magazine and Chiropractic Economics.
Where the work stands today
Since 2021, Aaron has held a full-time Senior Software Cloud Engineer & Team Lead role — not named here by design, kept separate from this site — owning technical direction for digital marketing and lead-generation platforms. That work includes automated ETL pipelines on Google Cloud (BigQuery, Data Labs) centralizing marketing and transactional data, a Java Spring Boot + Angular e-commerce platform he's a lead contributor on, and piloting AI-assisted engineering workflows (Claude, Gemini, Cursor, Codex) to speed up prototyping and refactoring. Alongside that, Aaron consults independently as a Business Growth & Tech Consultant through Brandager. In 2020, Aaron was recognized by the Jacksonville Business Journal as a "Technology Leader of the Year."
See what the record actually looks like
This page is the claim. The work is the evidence.