My tech journey began in the fall of 1982 with a TI-99/4A, no formal training, and a knack for creative problem-solving. I used the TI as a terminal to connect to a DEC-10 system, where I’d send messages to the sysop—usually a bored student pulling the graveyard shift. More often than not, they’d share access credentials just so they’d have someone to play DECWAR with. Those late-night gaming sessions were my first lessons in networking, both technical and social.
After my DECWAR days, I built my first clone of the IBM PC and developed inventory control and billing software for my father’s company. From there, a friend convinced a company to take a chance on me, and that’s where I started writing communications software for timeclocks, helping machines talk to each other before it was trendy.
The journey took me through some fascinating projects. At NACOLAH in Chicago, I helped modernize life insurance illustration software, separating the user interface from calculations in ways that seem quaint now but were cutting-edge for VB6. I even chaired a standards team that created coding guidelines, because apparently someone thought I had opinions worth documenting.
Later, at Fort Knox National Company, I led teams building e-payment processing systems, wrangling credit cards, debit cards, and ACH transactions through a three-tier architecture. We converted ASP sites to ASP.NET, exported data to XML with XSLT transforms, and generally made money move around the internet in secure ways.
The stint at Rawlings Company was particularly fun—our team built a distributed computing environment called WorkBroker for data mining. Picture a bunch of office PCs moonlighting as a compute cluster when nobody was using them. My contribution was creating the Windows service that would intelligently spin up more threads when computers were idle and back off when someone needed to actually, you know, work. It was like having a secret army of processors doing your bidding after hours, and watching the whole team’s pieces come together was incredibly satisfying.
I spent the last 10 years of my career at Salesforce, where I worked as a senior and lead engineer building a highly scalable text message sending engine using the SMPP protocol. Yes, you can blame me for those annoying marketing messages—but hey, they work! The challenge of handling massive throughput with multi-threaded C# services, MSMQ queuing, and connections to third-party aggregators was endlessly entertaining.
Later at Salesforce, I joined a newly formed team taking ownership of SMS/SMPP delivery for Marketing Cloud. I dove headfirst into FedX Managed Releases, Spinnaker Pipelines, and Java at age 60—because apparently learning new things gets easier with age, or at least more entertaining. We implemented staggered rollouts to minimize production impact, pushed test coverage from 70% to 82%, and modernized our deployment pipelines. I also served as DRI (Directly Responsible Individual, for those not drowning in corporate acronyms) for migrating services to AWS GovCloud, which involved everything from initial deployments to regional rollouts to making sure the alerting actually alerted.
Along the way, I’ve led teams, mentored engineers, created coding standards, handled code reviews, and probably attended more meetings than any human should endure. I’ve worked with everything from VB3 to Java, SQL Server to DynamoDB, and made machines talk to each other across protocols that range from elegant to “why does this even exist?”
Since retiring in 2024, I’ve been exploring various Linux distros, diving into gaming, learning Rust (because who doesn’t want to fight with a borrow checker in retirement?), and rediscovering my love for tech without the pressure of production incidents at 3 AM. It’s been a wild ride, filled with tech challenges, triumphs, and a few bugs that still keep me up at night.
Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!”
Hunter S. Thompson