People come first
Software should serve people. Good systems respect users and make the people operating them more capable.
About
Hey, I'm David.
Husband, dad, solution architect, software engineer, musician, and lifelong builder
I help organizations turn ambitious ideas and difficult business problems into coherent architecture, executable plans, and reliable systems. I am most at home where solution architecture, technical leadership, and hands-on delivery meet.
Introduction
I have never fit neatly into a single technical lane. Over more than 25 years, I have led teams, shaped architecture, designed products, written software across the stack, operated production systems, and built everything from cloud platforms to mobile apps and connected devices.
The common thread is making difficult things understandable and achievable. I translate vision into architecture, turn ambiguity into an executable path, and stay close enough to the implementation to know whether a design actually works. I enjoy helping people see the whole system without losing sight of the person using it.
Principles
What guides my work
Own the outcome
I do not stop at a diagram or a pull request. I care whether the work succeeds in production and creates lasting value.
Make complexity understandable
Good architecture helps a team understand how a system works, compare tradeoffs, and change direction safely.
Build for reality
Failures, operations, security, data integrity, and maintenance are part of the design, not details for later.
Grow people, not dependencies
I share context, mentor deliberately, and create space for others to become confident owners and experts.
Practice faithful stewardship
I try to bring excellence, integrity, humility, and care to the time, trust, resources, and responsibilities I receive.
Beyond software
Faith, music, the outdoors, and making
My Christian faith is central to who I am. It shapes how I try to lead, serve, make decisions, treat people, and define meaningful work. I do not live that out perfectly, but I want integrity, grace, courage, and faithful stewardship to be visible in the way I work and live.
Away from a keyboard, I play several musical instruments and love camping and the outdoors. I also spend a lot of time working with my hands on construction, woodworking, repairs, and projects around my property and homestead. I enjoy the mix of creativity, craft, practical problem-solving, and the satisfaction of making something real.
Independent work
What I build when no one assigns the problem
I am almost always building, learning, or experimenting outside my day-to-day work. My side projects range from developer tools and full-stack applications to homelab infrastructure, automation, connected devices, and whatever technical problem has captured my attention. Some become public products or open-source projects; others remain useful experiments that sharpen how I think and work.
Two recent examples are Kekonic Diagrams, a semantic diagram-as-code platform with automatic layout, live embeds, animation, a studio, command-line tooling, and editor integrations; and ProjectDrafter, an interactive woodworking-planning product with synchronized 2D and 3D experiences. They are examples of my work, not the boundaries of it, and I expect this list to keep growing.
On this site I publish the implementation details and tradeoffs behind durable execution, event-driven systems, domain-driven design, production engineering, modernization, and technical leadership. You can browse all of my engineering articles by date.