I’ve been building software for about thirty years.

I started in 1996 building GIS software for the University of Florida. Then I spent thirty years in and around large engineering organizations.

Most of that was at Turner Broadcasting, where I went from writing code to running architecture, and eventually led the cloud transformation of the company’s digital portfolio — CNN, Bleacher Report, March Madness Live, TBS, TNT, Adult Swim. Thousands of assets migrated in under two years, along with training a few hundred engineers to actually use what we’d built. After the AT&T merger I was SVP of Platform and Data Engineering at WarnerMedia. Today I’m SVP of Data and Platform Engineering at SoundCloud.

Two detours are worth mentioning.

In 2014 I was at The Home Depot, working with Apple through the iOS 8 prelaunch cycle on Apple Pay and indoor wayfinding. We were building toward launch-partner status. Then the breach happened — a week before Apple’s keynote — and the project quietly ended. Home Depot didn’t ship Apple Pay for another ten years.

Later that same year I joined Yik Yak as Director of Engineering, during the stretch where it was growing faster than its infrastructure could hold. We rebuilt the backend on AWS while it was running, and the team went from five people to thirty-five in eighteen months. What happened to the company afterward is well documented, and it isn’t an engineering story. The scaling was real, and I’m still proud of it.

These days I write software again — three products so far, across six platforms, built almost entirely with AI tooling. It has been the most interesting stretch of engineering work I’ve done in a decade, and I intend to write about it properly.

Somewhere along the way I was a Microsoft MVP for architecture, sat on the Microsoft Certified Architect board, and co-founded the Atlanta chapter of IASA. I hold a degree in criminal justice and most of a master’s in urban planning, and no computer science education whatsoever.