I build the kind of systems I spent two decades keeping alive.

Twenty-five years in enterprise architecture. Financial services, retail, e-commerce. The kind of work that taught me that boring is the goal.

I started writing code in the late 1990s — Java, C++, the long apprenticeship that produced everyone who shipped systems in the 2010s. Somewhere along the way I stopped writing code and started reasoning about it. The job became architecture, and architecture turned out to be mostly listening.

Today I lead enterprise architecture at Envestnet, a wealth-management platform serving more than $5T in assets. The work is unglamorous in the best way: the modular monolith that survived a re-org, the read-only legacy adoption pattern that took the mainframe bill down by $14M a year, the deploy script that no longer deletes the production database.

On the side — and increasingly, on the front — I am building two companies. CAIA is an AI-native engineering platform that replaces the engineering decision layer with an autonomous engine and exposes a navigation UI to a non-coder operator. Stolution is a neighborhood-commerce platform that wants to give mom-and-pop stores Amazon-grade capability. Both are pre-launch. Both are built entirely by AI under my direction. I have not written production code in eighteen months. It turns out twenty-five years of writing code earns you the right to stop.

I write here about the patterns that survive: enterprise architecture, AI agents, observability, and the slow shift in what an engineering meeting looks like when the senior engineer in the room is a model.

I write about conferences and the technologies that surface there — I do not speak at them. The running notebook covers fifty-one events across seventeen years, followed as a working architect rather than performed from a stage. The patterns I keep finding land here as essays.

If you have a problem that needs an architect, say hello. I take a small number of consulting engagements each year, mostly fractional, mostly in the messy middle between strategy and execution.