About
The short version
I spent thirty years in technology, most of them at SAS Institute — one of the largest privately held software companies in the world. I joined as a network systems engineer in 1999 and left in 2023 as Vice President of Compute and Data Services. In between, I did nearly everything: built and led software development teams, directed enterprise R&D, and ultimately took ownership of the core processing engines and data access layers at the heart of the SAS platform — across both the traditional on-premises product and its cloud-native successor.
In 2023 I left to build things on my own terms.
The longer version
My career started in 1990 at Carolina Power & Light, writing COBOL on an IBM mainframe. That's where I learned that the details matter — that the work either runs right or it doesn't, and that there's no hiding from it when it doesn't.
From there I moved through a series of roles that, in retrospect, look like an oddly intentional preparation for everything that followed. I designed and implemented call center systems. I built and ran the IT infrastructure for a startup. I joined SAS in 1999 and spent the next 23 years growing with the company through nearly every layer of the technical organization.
The SAS years were formative in a way that's hard to compress into a paragraph. I managed MIS teams when SAS was still figuring out enterprise IT. I moved into R&D, building and leading the teams responsible for SAS's enterprise compute management platforms. Eventually I took VP responsibility for the core processing engines and data access components of the SAS System — the fundamental machinery that enterprise customers around the world license, deploy, and run their most critical analytical workloads on.
That last chapter is the one that shaped me most. SAS 9, the established platform, ran predominantly in customer on-premises data centers — large, complex, carefully tuned environments with decades of accumulated process and expectation baked in. Simultaneously, I helped shape and deliver those same capabilities in SAS Viya, a Kubernetes-based, cloud-native rewrite of the platform targeting Azure, AWS, on-premises K8s infrastructure, and occasional GCP deployments.
Navigating that bridge — keeping SAS 9 healthy and trusted while simultaneously modernizing the same product for a fundamentally different deployment model — is the kind of problem that touches everything. Architecture decisions. Security posture across cloud and on-prem environments. DevOps and CI/CD pipelines that have to accommodate both the legacy release cadence and the continuous delivery expectations of cloud customers. Organizational alignment between teams that built software one way for twenty years and teams that needed to build it a completely different way. It is, as it happens, exactly the challenge that a large fraction of the enterprise software industry is still working through.
Why independent?
Partly timing, partly temperament. By 2023 I'd accomplished what I set out to accomplish inside a large organization. The problems that energize me — genuine ambiguity, cross-domain synthesis, moving fast on something that actually matters — tend to find better homes in smaller contexts. Consulting lets me bring everything I've accumulated to bear on a specific, bounded problem, and then move to the next one.
I'm also, it turns out, a builder. I've always had side projects. Now they're the main project between engagements, and that suits me.
What I'm working on
I'm currently developing two software products — one in the Microsoft ecosystem, one for Apple platforms — and working on some infrastructure automation tooling I've been meaning to finish for a while. None of them are ready to announce. I'll update this page when they are.
What I'm looking for
Four to six focused engagements per year. I'm drawn to the kind of complex, cross-domain problem that doesn't fit neatly into a job description — where someone needs a senior technologist who has seen enough to know what they're looking at.
I'm not looking for a job. I'm looking for interesting problems.
The name
Tech-Surfers started as a blog built around a metaphor I've always found genuinely apt: riding waves of change. In surfing and in technology, the conditions are always shifting. The skills that worked yesterday may not be the ones you need today. Adaptability isn't a soft skill — it's the whole game.
The metaphor faded into the background as the work moved to the foreground. The name stayed. It still fits.