I work across system architecture, data, and modernization, drawing on 25 years of experience across Mainframe, Linux, and AWS (Amazon Web Services). Over that time, I’ve worked as a software developer, team lead, sysadmin, database administrator, data engineer, and production support specialist. In large organizations, the hats you wear often do not align with your title.
For nearly a decade, I served on the architecture design team for one of the largest Property and Casualty (P&C) claim systems in the industry. It was a large distributed system with its own screen presentation layer, transaction manager, remote procedure call libraries, and data movement framework. I led the architecture, data movement, and application security teams and owned the code for those components.
On the current system, I’ve worked across application support, platform operations, database administration, and now modernization consulting … spanning data strategy, system architecture, and migration planning. That breadth … from architecture on the prior platform through application support, operations, and data to the current modernization effort … is what gives me a front-row seat to the realities of enterprise modernization: the tradeoffs, the legacy debt, and the people who hold it all together.
I’ve designed systems, debugged them at 2 a.m., migrated them to new platforms, and mentored the people who keep them running.
The fact that we help real people on the worst days of their lives drives my commitment to uptime and quality.
I write about what I’ve learned along the way: system design, modernization, leadership, risk, knowledge transfer, and the complex intersection of technology and business decisions.
When the writing touches leadership, it comes from both sides. I spent years leading informally before making a mid-career move into formal tech leadership, which answered some questions and raised entirely different ones.
I also hold a Chartered Financial Consultant (ChFC®) designation from The American College. It’s a different discipline, but it sharpened how I think about risk and business outcomes.
Note: The blog title comes from a running joke … some folks call me Columbo because I always come back with “just one more thing.”