New year, and I’m making myself an actual resolution instead of a vague one: write more, share more of what I’m actually seeing and thinking about. It’s been a while since I posted here, so consider this the restart.
Somewhere in the gap between my last post and this one, I had kids. Then more kids. I’m now outnumbered by four boys, all under ten, which is exactly as loud and chaotic as it sounds and I wouldn’t trade it. Somewhere in that same stretch I moved from hands-on cybersecurity work into architecture, then from architecture into architecture leadership, across a couple of different companies along the way. If you want the actual timeline, my LinkedIn has the details, this post isn’t the place for a resume.
There’s a bigger change we’re planning too. In 2025 we dipped our toes into the short-term rental world and bought a property in the Palma Sola area of Bradenton, Florida. We loved it enough, and often enough, that we’re now planning to make the move for real, trading Midwest winters for a lot more sun and a lot less snow – likely in the Florida panhandle to be closer to the wife’s family in Gulf Shores but still close enough to drive to the rental here and there.
The blog is changing along with all of that. What I write about here is going to lean less technical and more toward the bigger picture, the stuff I’ve gotten a lot closer to since moving into leadership: how organizations actually make architecture decisions, where governance really breaks down, the tradeoffs that don’t show up in a technical spec. I’ve been leading architecture teams for almost six years now, and I’ve picked up a lot along the way from technology leaders I’ve had the chance to learn from directly. If I had to describe how I try to lead, it’s democratic first, I don’t think good ideas only come from the top, they come from wherever the person closest to the problem happens to be sitting. It’s servant leadership on top of that, my job is to listen, clear obstacles, and take care of the people doing the work, not just direct it from above. And because I came up through architecture and I’m still leading architecture day to day, I run it a bit like a player-coach, staying hands-on with the actual work instead of managing it purely from a distance. I’ll probably write about leadership itself at some point too, what that’s actually looked like in practice, what’s worked, what hasn’t.
So that’s the resolution: write more, share more of what I’m seeing from this side of the table. Let’s see how it goes.