About

I am a Principal Architect working for Health Diagnostic Laboratory, Inc. I work for them building their Enterprise medical support systems, helping them to design and build custom software solutions and implement packaged solutions.

I've worked in software development for almost twenty years. My experiences have run the gamut from mainframe COBOL development, to Unix C++, to Enterprise Java and dynamic languages like Ruby. I've been involved in huge development projects and tiny ones. Along the way I've gathered many opinions and observations:

Smaller is better - it's too easy to get lost in the weeds and lose your focus in large projects, break them down into smaller components whenever possible
Passionate developers can always learn - there are many types of developers, the vast majority are working a nine-to-five job. Those developers adapt slowly to change. Developers who are passionate for technology adapt much more quickly and can grow to fill every role.
OpenSource is cleaner - I've seen the code produced by many, many proprietary development teams. Much of it would not survive the light of day in an OpenSource project. Publishing code to the world results in a far harsher code review then in any internal process.

I believe strongly in good design and agile processes. Architects are essential to guide and assist in the software development process. I'm not a paper architect. Details matter in design. If an architect hasn't used the technologies they advocate it becomes very easy to misapply them. Keeping your hand in is crucial.

On top of all this I've finally switched to the Mac. It's the first time I've had any direct exposure to OS/X. I ran Linux on a laptop for two years to see how usable it was in a corporate environment. I ended up going back to Windows. Now I'm doing the same for the Mac.

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