About
Thirty years alternating between architecture and hands-on delivery, because each keeps the other honest.
I started writing code in the early nineties and have spent the years since moving between architecture and hands-on development. The alternation is deliberate. Architecture done at a distance from the code drifts into fiction; code written without an architectural position accumulates decisions nobody made on purpose.
Most of my work has been in regulated sectors in both the U.S. and New Zealand (finance, real estate, health, government services, primary industries) where systems are long-lived and the cost of getting change wrong is measured in more than money. That environment teaches a discipline: change delivered incrementally, with the old system running until the new one has earned its place.
In recent years a growing share of the work is applied AI: agentic and retrieval systems, mostly on self-hosted and open-source models, for organisations that cannot send their data elsewhere. I work independently, usually embedded with an in-house team.
HOW I WORK
- Evidence before theory
- Architecture before implementation, never instead of it
- Open questions documented, not papered over
- The measure of an engagement is what the team can do after it ends
AI is powerful. Dependence is dangerous. Resilience comes from ownership.