Roger Henley

coming soon · late 2026

Industrial automation, plant operations, applied AI.

Thirty years running regulated, 24-hour manufacturing. The last eight in bourbon — commissioning distillery startups from concrete pour to steady-state, in the kind of shifts you don’t brag about. This site is the working version of that practice: what I do, the projects behind it, and how to reach me.

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in the field
30yrAcross power, mining, telecom, industrial automation, and applied AI.
distillery startups
8yrWhiskey House of Kentucky and its predecessors. Concrete pour to steady-state.
schedule
24/7Regulated, continuous production. The kind that pages you at 3 a.m.
Top bubble tray of a continuous distillation column, viewed through the sight glass — rows of vapor caps against a wet copper wash.
column top bubble tray · post-run

The abstract stuff has to survive a copper still, a fermentation cycle, and a plant manager who’s been up for eighteen hours.

— on why control theory and production reality have to meet somewhere

the practice

Five areas — usually mixed together on one engagement.

Naming them separately makes it easier for you to decide whether we should talk. Every real project pulls from at least three.

Roger at a University of Kentucky podium giving a talk on enabling citizen developers with low-code tooling and BI.
University of Kentucky · talk on citizen developers

alongside the work

Talks, notes, and open source.

I write about the parts of digital transformation that don’t survive the vendor slides — how a control room actually adopts a new tool, how “citizen developer” enablement works when the citizens have wrenches on their belts, why the plant historian is a distributed database whether IT knows it or not.

Frameworks like MDEMG and Forge live on GitHub, free for use.

github.com/reh3376

A dragline excavator at Hobet Mining at dusk, its boom silhouetted against the sky over a stripped bench.

hobet mining · west virginia

Thirty years of on-the-floor places.

Coal draglines, telecom central offices, high-voltage substations, SCADA rooms, and — for the last eight — distillery fermentation floors. The photograph is one of a long list. More ship with the gallery in a later phase.

A multi-monitor engineering workstation in a home office. A goldendoodle sits underfoot.
home workshop · the dog is not for scale

when the shift ends

A working room, a family, a dog with strong opinions.

Long hours in industrial jobs are only sustainable if the rest of a life is real. The workshop above is where the R&D happens between shifts — frameworks written, models trained, papers read, and the occasional deploy at midnight. The goldendoodle supervises.

A Whiskey House of Kentucky team meeting on the production floor during commissioning.
Whiskey House of Kentucky · team, mid-commissioning

built with a team

None of this is a solo act.

Distillery startups are built with operators, control engineers, instrument techs, safety officers, IT, quality, and a couple of contractors you learn to trust. The best days on this job are the ones where the team fixes something the org didn’t know it had — and no one takes the credit.

open source

Public repositories.

The frameworks and tools I work in the open. If one lines up with something you’re building, you can request contributor access below and I’ll add you.

Request contributor accessSee all on GitHub

about this site

The site is itself a live work sample.

Go API and Python sidecar behind a Next.js front-end, all speaking Protobuf. Deployed with Docker Compose behind Caddy on a small Hetzner box. Source, spec, ADRs, and every decision that shaped it are public.

repo
reh3376/career-site
stack
go · python · next.js · postgres
deploy
docker · caddy · hetzner
contribute
open to contributors