Thirty-plusyearsatthedraftingtable.

I learned Title 24 sitting next to a structural engineer. In the year 2000 I took a desk in his office and did energy reports alongside his framing plans. He’d hand me a set, I’d run the calcs, we’d staple it all together and send it out. Residential, mostly. Small additions, new single-family, the occasional duplex. That was the rhythm for years.

Somewhere around the third code cycle I noticed the performance method was doing better by our clients than the prescriptive path. More flexibility in the envelope, fewer forced trade-offs, reports that passed on the first try. The software was faster than people gave it credit for; the reputation for being complicated mostly belonged to people who didn’t use it every day.

So I went solo, kept the focus narrow (residential, performance method, California), and I’ve been at it ever since. Thirty-plus years. Hundreds of reports. Seven code cycles, including the continuing education I just finished for 2025. A practice doesn’t need to be big to be good. It needs to be clear about what it is.