My full name is William Carson McRae. Everyone calls me Carson.
That’s where the W in this site’s address comes from.
I’m a technical program and product leader at Booz Allen Hamilton, based in the Nashville area. I spend my working hours helping engineering teams deliver software, and a good chunk of my free time building software of my own.
I’ve been doing some version of that second thing since I was a kid. The tools have changed. The urge to understand how something works, and then build a better one, has not.
How I got here
Age 13
A Minecraft server
I worked with developers on a Minecraft server that caught the attention of the creators of Mineplex. It was one of the first things I helped build that other people actually used.
2015
My first PC build
It wasn’t the last.
2022
Vanderbilt University
Graduated after studying Human & Organizational Development and Political Science.
Oct 2026
Married Nicole
Our wedding was also the launch of PicPledge, the event photo-sharing app I built.
Today
A slightly unusual path into tech
At Vanderbilt, I studied Human & Organizational Development (how people, teams, and organizations actually work) and Political Science (how groups with competing interests reach decisions).
That turns out to be a pretty good foundation for coordinating several engineering teams toward the same release. The technical depth came from the other direction: years of building, breaking, and fixing things on my own.
How I like to work
Done means someone can use it. Merged code is not the finish line. Something is done when the whole journey works for the person on the other end, in the place they actually use it.
Make the tradeoff visible. Every plan gives something up. I’d rather write down what we chose, what we gave up, and why, so the reasoning outlives the meeting.
Learn how it actually works. I want to understand a system well enough to ask good questions, spot risky assumptions, and notice when something sounds too easy.
Stay through delivery. Plans are the easy part. I like staying with the work through release and real use, which is where the interesting problems tend to show up.
Quick facts
- Name
- William Carson McRae (Carson)
- Based in
- Nashville, Tennessee
- Works at
- Booz Allen Hamilton
- Studied
- Vanderbilt University, Class of 2022
- Builds
- Web apps, mobile apps, and PCs
- Household
- Nicole, Margot, and Quinn
Next: my work, or life outside it.