Independent judgement.
Down to the root cause.
Triage keeps the queue moving. Root causes wait.
Proper Tools is my independent consulting practice.
I am most useful when a question is clear enough to matter but not yet clear enough to answer. Usually that means the knowledge is scattered, the assumptions are unnamed, and reasonable accounts disagree.
I trace problems across the boundaries where they hide: between teams, vendors, standards, and decades. I distinguish what is known from what is inferred, make the important assumptions and dependencies visible, and help the people responsible decide what follows.
My work draws on more than twenty-five years across cybersecurity operations, infrastructure, standards, and policy.
Ways to work together
Most work starts with a standalone assignment: a focused question, a clear purpose, and a fee agreed in advance.
Proper Tools also maintains a small number of continuing advisory relationships for clients who want an independent perspective from someone who already understands their people, systems, and open questions.
A straightforward first conversation
I would rather tell you plainly whether this is a fit than sell you something that is not.
Current work: time and timestamp resilience
A significant part of my current public-interest work concerns the 2036–2038 timestamp rollovers: known technical failure boundaries distributed across software, devices, infrastructure, and supply chains.
I am the primary drafter and a co-editor of ITU-T Technical Paper XSTP.epoch and co-chair the FIRST Time Security SIG. The work is one example of the broader Proper Tools pattern: understand the technical reality deeply enough to make it useful to the people who must plan, decide, and coordinate.
New in the Commons
calmoji: calendar rituals for people who drift off task
Ready-made calendar layers for protecting focus, finding humane meeting times across time zones, and making overloaded weeks more legible. Switch the layers on to plan and off to work. Claim a block by copying it into your own calendar.
Plain .ics files for the calendar you already use.
No app, no account, nothing to install. Free and open source. The
2038 calendars double as a small year-2038 test for calendar
software.
Research and the Commons
Some of the work belongs to everyone.
Open frameworks, protocols, working papers, and civic texts, released for inspection, criticism, adaptation, and reuse.
Current work includes calmoji, The Hippocratic Oath of the Cybersecurity Practitioner, the Meridian Protocol for durable web preservation, and XSTP.epoch.
Proper Tools is being built so that paid consulting, standards participation, public-interest research, and work released into the Commons strengthen one another.
The public work keeps the practice close to emerging questions, makes the reasoning available for inspection, and improves the advice clients receive.
Latest Field Note
Start here
Bring me the question as it currently exists.
You do not need a finished brief or a neatly classified problem.
A useful first note says what is happening, who is involved, what decision or deadline is approaching, and what kind of help might be useful.
Introductions are welcome. So are half-formed questions.
Start a conversation →