About

My paper record has always lagged what I could actually do. Worth saying plainly rather than hoping you infer it.

I started in 1997 as employee 40 at a company that grew past 150 inside a year, and I hired 40 of those people myself before moving over to the technical side. I have no computer science degree. I earned certifications instead, Windows NT 4.0, then Visual Basic 6, then C# on .NET 1.0, and taught myself the rest because the work in front of me needed it. That has been the pattern ever since: the capability shows up first and the title catches up later, sometimes not at all.

Most of the time since has gone into platforms, and the part I care about is the second half. Plenty of people can design a system. Fewer stay with it through the audit, the region build-out, and the night half the hardware stops answering. I spent eight years inside a public cloud running services other companies had built their businesses on. If the key management service is down, nothing encrypts or decrypts. If object storage is down, nothing can write a log. You design differently once that is your problem, and you find out quickly what it costs to get it wrong.

The other half of the work is people. I took one engagement from a single engineer to more than seventy across thirteen product teams, and grew several of them into senior and architect roles along the way. What made that hold together was not headcount. It was turning up for the client's executive every day with something their own organization was not telling them, staying down in the delivery work where the real friction is visible rather than managing from above it, and bringing the bad news early enough for it to still be useful.

I have been working hands-on with AI since late 2022, and building production software with coding agents, which mostly taught me how badly that goes without discipline. So I built the discipline: a framework that runs agents under defined roles and automated gates and refuses to take their word for anything. Two products have shipped through it. I write about what it actually takes, including the parts that did not work.

One thing worth knowing about how I describe my work. If a colleague designed it, I say so. If I oversaw something rather than built it myself, I say that too. It costs me a few impressive sentences, and it means the ones that are left can be relied on.

I work independently through 494 Group, from Minneapolis. Still hands-on, and planning to stay that way.