Engineering Philosophy

Clarity over Cleverness If it’s hard to read, it’s hard to trust. The first time I broke a healthcare system, it was with a single line of code. It was 2004. I was working under the U.S. Army Medical Command, part of a small but scrappy development team supporting military hospitals. We used Oracle—10g at the time, powerful but brittle—and I had written what I considered a masterpiece: a stored procedure that consolidated nurse staffing, patient census, and acuity levels into a real-time dashboard. The logic was dense but efficient, dynamically generating views based on parameters and metadata stored in a config table. ...

Reliability over Performance Unreliable code scales mistakes. Reliability scales value. The dashboards looked great. Clean, fast, exactly what leadership asked for. And somewhere beneath that polished surface, a silent flaw was already scaling. It happened in the middle of a high-stakes transformation—an enterprise data platform rebuild with global visibility. The goal was ambitious: consolidate systems, modernize reporting, and get critical metrics into the hands of leaders faster than ever before. ...