Systems that are still running.

The same six problems, in different buildings.

The sector changes, the vocabulary changes, the stack changes. These do not. Each one is running somewhere right now, and links to where.

Joining systems that were never meant to join

A dozen agency systems, none of which had ever been asked for an API, behind one enterprise service bus. One architectural rule does most of the work: everything reaches the outside system through the bus, so when a vendor changes, one connection changes. Ten years of it at DC Department of Public Works

Reporting that assembles itself

A warehouse under the operation, so a weekly spreadsheet becomes an answer in seconds. The same shape turns a research center’s four-week annual report into a two-day review, because the report is built from data the center already has. What that looks like inside a center

Retrieval a person can check

An advisor grounded in a program’s own guidance and an office’s funded proposals, where every answer carries the citation back to the document it came from. If the person reading it cannot check the answer, they cannot act on it, and that constraint decides the whole design. Where this runs today

Regulated data, in production

HIPAA infrastructure holding live patient records, hardened to CIS Level 1 and through a state security review while the emergency was happening. FERPA-covered case management for a public school system, built in 2010 and still in service. Two state pandemic responses

Volume that arrives all at once

45 million messages sent and received across two state health departments. A hundred million telemetry readings off a two-hundred-vehicle fleet. Block-level service alerts that residents know as MyDPW. The alerting platform, now a product

Performance tuning and load testing

maryland.gov moved off Windows onto Linux, hardened to CIS Level 1, then load tested and tuned to hold 150,000 requests a minute. Four working days, ahead of a governor’s press conference, because the alternative was the site falling over live on television. How the four-day rebuild went

Every one of these went into production and stayed there.

• Two state pandemic responses, built while they were happening

  A mass vaccination scheduling system for a state health department, built while the emergency was happening. A million appointments, ten thousand a day at peak, on infrastructure that had to hold HIPAA data and pass a state security review at the same time.

  Maryland and Delaware
  Prime contractor, 2020–2023

• Ten years in production for a city public works department

  A hundred million telemetry readings off a two-hundred-vehicle snowplow fleet, joined with a dozen agency systems into one queryable picture of the operation. Through four administrations and a pandemic, without a gap.

  DC Department of Public Works
  Continuous since July 2016

• $120 million a year in policies, across eight countries Write-up soon

  A travel insurance commerce platform we architected and built from nothing: eight countries on three continents, five currencies, fourteen languages, thirty-odd sites, three AWS regions. We finished in 2015. It is still selling policies today.

  Travel insurance group
  Subcontract, 2012–2015

• Four weeks of annual reporting, down to a two-day review Write-up soon

  The report now assembles itself from data the center already has. The coordinator reviews and edits instead of chasing fifty researchers for it.

  NSF research center
  In production

• Proposal help that knows the solicitation better than the deadline allows Write-up soon

  Grounded in the program guidance and the office’s own funded proposals, so the advice is specific enough to act on at four in the afternoon.

  University research office
  In production

• A failing student records system, taken over and finished Write-up soon

  Case management for a public school system, inherited mid-crisis. We got it to a first release, then led four more years of development on it. All of it under FERPA, and still in service as far as we know.

  Public school system
  Subcontract, 2010–2014

• Shipping without configuring servers, at Autodesk Write-up soon

  An automated, repeatable continuous delivery system on AWS, Elastic Beanstalk and Docker, so the development team could spend its time on features rather than on server configuration.

  Autodesk
  Continuous delivery

• An online university portal, prototyped and handed over Write-up soon

  Booz Allen Hamilton asked for a prototype of a new online university system portal. We built it, and mentored their technical team on development, deployment and performance tuning so the result held up in their hands.

  Booz Allen Hamilton
  Prototype and mentoring

• Architecture for a platform outgrowing itself Write-up soon

  A rapidly expanding advocacy platform saw its scalability problem coming. We designed the next-generation architecture with them and coached their engineers through growth capacity and performance, so the knowledge stayed in the building.

  Phone2Action, now Quorum
  Architecture and mentoring

More write-ups land every few weeks. If one of these looks like your problem and the page is not written yet, ask and we will walk you through it on a call.