I build systems that make other systems talk to each other. Twenty years in, that’s still the part I find most interesting: not the services themselves, but the seams between them, and everything that has to go right for a message to survive the trip.
Two things drive the work. The first is efficiency. Distributed systems burn a startling share of their budget on coordination alone: latency, dollars, and the attention of whoever is on call for it. Event-driven architecture is where I keep finding leverage, because the genuinely hard parts here aren’t even new. Telephony engineers were solving fault tolerance for massively concurrent, always-on systems with Erlang and the switches it grew out of long before anyone wrote the first pattern catalog, and the people who later wrote about integration patterns gave the rest of us a vocabulary for it.
The second is iteration speed. I want something real in front of people quickly, then to find out whether it’s any use to them and go again. I spent ten years in SRE and still love the craft of it, but reliability is always in service of something, and I’d rather spend my time on the something. That’s where agentic development has my attention. It’s a genuine accelerant, and the same distributed systems thinking that keeps a fleet of services honest turns out to matter just as much when what you’re coordinating is a fleet of agents instead.
This is how I work.
Background
20+ years shipping software. It started with BASIC on a Tandy Color Computer 3 wired to a black and white TV in 1989, and the obsession hasn’t changed since: get the computer to do more of the work so a human has to do less of it.
Since then, data pipelines chewing through millions of events, integration layers stitching together dozens of external systems, and a long trail of automation that quietly deleted entire categories of manual work. These days I mostly write about the patterns that keep those systems standing up under load, and under failure.
What I Write About
- Distributed Systems: Event-driven architecture, integration patterns, and the messaging primitives (Kafka, RabbitMQ, sagas) that hold it all together
- Agentic Development: Applying decades-old messaging patterns to AI agent orchestration
- System Automation: Making toil disappear
- Engineering Leadership: Building teams that ship
Away From The Keyboard
My introduction to Buddhism wasn’t academic. I put on the robes for three days for my father-in-law’s funeral, and somewhere in those three days I read the Dhammapada for the first time. I’ve been chasing it ever since, first through the Pali canon, including the Majjhima Nikāya, one sutta a day for 152 days, which turned out to be less a reading project than a slow rearrangement of how I think, and then out into the Mahayana classics: the Laṅkāvatāra, the Diamond, the Lotus, the Flower Ornament.
The Vimalakīrti Sutra is the cornerstone of my practice: the sharpest person in the room is a householder rather than a monk. I read all of this more philosophically than spiritually, but the practice question stays open for me: what this path actually looks like walked in an engaged, ordinary life.
I travel at any excuse. Recent favorites include a solo week crossing Germany and a month in Cambodia with my family that quietly redirected my career.
And I’ve been an RPG lifer from the start. The classics did the early damage: Final Fantasy, Shadowrun on both the tabletop and the 16-bit adaptations, and Bullfrog-era PC games like Syndicate. The modern era has been just as good to me, with Cyberpunk 2077, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and the Final Fantasy VII remakes finally doing right by the game that ate my teenage years. If this site looks like it was assembled in a back-alley ripperdoc clinic, now you know who to blame.
Somewhere in the gaps I’m reading about Late Antiquity (would’ve been a history professor in another life) and building Gundam models.
Quotes That Stick
“Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.” - Marcus Aurelius
“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” - Kurt Vonnegut
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” - Carl Jung