Thirty years fixing expensive problems. Now on my own.

I started in 1996 at VocalTec, selling software that carried phone calls over the internet, then spent years on the messaging systems behind business phones at Avaya and the firms that installed them. In 2011 I started writing the software myself. Most of it was work that was not allowed to stop: healthcare payments at Optum, part of UnitedHealth Group, live streaming at Sling TV, safety devices at ROAR For Good, patient referrals at Blockit.

Six industries that look nothing alike, and underneath they were the same job. Something expensive was being done by hand, or by a system that had stopped fitting, and somebody had to work out what it really cost before writing a line of code to replace it.

The most recent chapter before going independent was as the sole backend engineer for a production e-commerce and savings platform at a national performance-marketing company — a walled system serving real customers at national scale, where I owned the whole server side and carried the pager for it.

Working for myself changed who I answer to, not the standard. I design, build, test, deploy and operate what I write, and you talk to me rather than to an account manager.