Twenty-five years, mainframe to AI
Mainframe → J2EE → microservices → cloud → AI. I’ve shipped through every era and watched each one get oversold. Voice-biometric fraud detection at JPMC (10M accounts in 90 days), the Indirect Tax Close platform at Vertex, and the HRCommand decomposition that drove the Optum acquisition of Connect Your Care.
Skeptical of trends, not of progress
A trend is a solution looking for a problem. Before adopting anything, I make it finish the sentence: “right now we can’t ___.” I’d rather build the capability than buy the dependency — the “Raise the Boats” curriculum taught ~50 people across engineering, product, and data science to build production AI agents from scratch.
Field notes from the build
I write about the work while it’s still warm — weekly notes on agent toolkits, cost-aware model routing, and the plumbing that keeps production AI running on hardware I own. The posts come from the week’s real commits, not a content calendar.
Selected Work
Robby
A multi-agent system for SDLC orchestration — built to remove process friction so engineers can spend time on the work they came here for.
Strangler-fig modernization
Decoupling a J2EE/EJB monolith into Spring Boot microservices. Contributed to the Optum acquisition.