Happy 250th Birthday to the United States Marine Corps
Once a Marine, Always a Marine
Posted on November 9, 2025
On November 10, 2025, the United States Marine Corps turns 250 years old. It all began in Tun Tavern in 1775 — yes, the Marine Corps was founded in a bar — and ever since, Marines have built a legacy of service, sacrifice, and dependability that continues to this day....
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Designing with Confidence: Using Feature Flags in Enterprise Applications
Designing for controlled change and safe experimentation.
Posted on November 5, 2025
Feature flags have become one of the most powerful tools in the modern architect’s toolkit. They allow teams to control application behavior dynamically without redeploying code. Used well, they create the safety net that lets organizations move faster while reducing risk.
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Understanding Event Types in Event-Driven Architecture
A comprehensive guide to event classifications and when to use them in your event-driven systems
Posted on July 8, 2025
In my work as a Principal Architect helping organizations adopt Event-Driven Architecture (EDA), one question comes up consistently: “When do I create events and how do I govern them?” It’s a fundamental question that gets to the heart of designing effective event-driven systems. From my experience working with teams across...
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Microsoft Build 2025 Recap: What's New in AI and Developer Tools
Key announcements, insights, and innovations from Microsoft's annual developer conference
Posted on May 23, 2025
Image credit: Microsoft
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AI Hackathon: Building the Future of Software Engineering
Exploring different approaches to AI integration in a real-world insurance claim processing scenario
Posted on May 14, 2025
Last week, I participated in an internal AI hackathon at Centric Consulting, focused on building an AI-powered insurance claim triage system. The challenge was based on a fictional scenario involving Censurance, a hypothetical insurance company. The hackathon brought together developers, engineers, and AI enthusiasts from across our organization to tackle...
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Understanding Event-driven Architecture - Terminology and Implementation Differences
EDA - Key Concepts, Approaches, and Better Practices for Modern Systems
Posted on January 19, 2025
Event-driven Architecture (EDA) is a paradigm shift in designing and building systems that respond to events or changes in the state of an object. As more of these systems come online, understanding EDA terminology and implementation patterns becomes increasingly important for architects and developers. This blog post aims to clarify...
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Evolving Enterprise Architectures with AI - Enhancing Business Processes Without Starting From Scratch
Practical patterns, integration strategies, and ideas for blending artificial intelligence into your existing systems.
Posted on December 9, 2024
As organizations increasingly recognize the value of artificial intelligence, the challenge shifts from theoretical discussions to practical integration. How can we embed AI into an established architecture without starting from scratch? This post explores common architectural design patterns and integration strategies that can help your business leverage AI to enhance...
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EDA with the Outbox Pattern
Ensuring Transactional Continuity with the Outbox Pattern in distributed applications
Posted on December 3, 2024
Distributed systems are powerful and help us address many problems but they often introduce others. Ensuring transactional continuity in multi-step processes are particularly difficult challenges. One that comes up a lot for me (for instance) is updating a database and publishing an event to a event stream simultaneously. This can...
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Comparing Event-driven Architecture (EDA) with Traditional Architectures
EDA vs SOA vs MSA
Posted on May 30, 2024
Event-driven Architecture (EDA) represents a paradigm shift in the design of enterprise solutions. While traditional architectures like Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Microservices Architecture (MSA) have long been the standards, EDA offers unique advantages that are worth exploring. In this post, we will compare EDA with these traditional architectures, highlighting their...
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Understanding the Saga Pattern - Process Orchestration vs. Choreography
Decoding the Saga - Strategic Transaction Management in Modern Applications
Posted on May 20, 2024
In the realm (I think I say ‘realm’ a lot) of enterprise solution architecture, ensuring reliable and consistent transactions across multiple services or applications is a significant challenge. The saga pattern is a powerful solution to this problem, providing a way to manage distributed transactions without relying on things like...
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Steering Clear of Event Hell - Best Practices for Event-driven Architecture
Mastering Event-driven Architecture - Essential Practices to Prevent Overcomplexity and Align with Business Goals.
Posted on May 10, 2024
Event-driven architecture (EDA) has become a cornerstone of modern application design, praised for its scalability and responsiveness. However, poorly managed EDA can lead to what is ominously referred to as “event hell,” where the complexity and volume of events become unmanageable. These are the types of mistakes that give a...
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Innovation & Transformation | AI for Small Business, Navigating Success and Pitfalls
Discover how AI tools can transform your operations and drive success while learning strategies to avoid common pitfalls.
Posted on May 6, 2024
Join Me at the Innovation & Transformation Panel This Week!
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Making Mistakes and Their Value To You and Your Career
Understand how great leaders treat people that have made mistakes and on having the space to make mistakes is important.
Posted on August 17, 2023
We are often told how making mistakes and learning from them is necessary for growth. It is a common sentiment, but important. A quick online search led me to quotes from renowned people emphasizing lessons they learned from their own mistakes. I’d like to share a story of a mistake...
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Contributing to AI/ML Innovation: Where You Can Make an Impact
There is a place for you to contribute to the exciting work currently being done in advancing AI/ML.
Posted on June 6, 2023
Many things have been written about ChatGPT and how it has blown the Gartner Hype Cycle to bits. It has stayed on the curve, but it has progressed much more quickly than most any other technology. We are somewhere on the “Slope of Enlightenment” where we are truly seeing the...
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Mastering the Technical-Leadership Balancing Act: Sustaining Your Software Engineering Career
Staying Technical While Leveraging Leadership Skills for Long-Term Success in the Software Engineering Field
Posted on May 31, 2023
Software engineering has been an incredible career choice, providing me with opportunities to be part of remarkable organizations and contribute to innovative projects. However, as the years pass and experience grows, you come to realize that your value extends beyond simply solving individual problems. You may find yourself standing at...
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Unlocking the Potential of ChatGPT: A Guide for Software Engineers
Orienting your skills toward AI/ML and recent developments
Posted on May 24, 2023
The realm of AI has witnessed significant advancements what seems like almost overnight. One of the most remarkable being the development of conversational AI models like OpenAI’s GPT offering. I have been surprised by how rapidly things have advanced and feel as if I’ve been playing catchup. Playing catchup often...
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Embracing the Future: An Aging Software Developer's Perspective on ChatGPT
My thoughts on an AI/ML and how recent "advances" will affect the next several years.
Posted on May 15, 2023
In a world that constantly evolves with technological advancements, the role of software developers remains crucial. However, the rapid progress in artificial intelligence has left some seasoned developers feeling uncertain about their place in the future. Let’s take a few minutes to dive into how I, an aging software developer,...
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QA or the Highway Recap
A summary of a talk I gave at the 2016 QA or the Highway tester conference.
Posted on February 29, 2016
On February 16, 2016 I had the opportunity to be one of the speakers at QA or the Highway in Columbus, Ohio. The following is a summary of the content of my talk.
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Personal Technology Map
My personal technology suite of tools
Posted on January 5, 2016
Personal Technolgy and Tools Map (updated)
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Ohio University MIS 4200 Quick Start
How to download the run the supplied source code for MIS4200
Posted on October 11, 2015
Below is a link to the ‘Quick Start’ tutorial on YouTube. This process will walk you through the setting up of your personal repository and importing the supplied code to where you will be doing your work.
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Speaking at COCCUG
Central Ohio Cloud Computing User Group
Posted on October 10, 2015
If you are in the area on October 10, 2015, please consider joining me at the Central Ohio Cloud Computing User Group meeting where I’ll be speaking about ‘Enterprise Event Driven Architecture’.
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A New Chapter In Our Lives
An open letter to our church family.
Posted on April 8, 2014
This is not a technical or IT related post. It is a very personal letter to a congregation of people I have been associated with since I was 5 years old.
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What Do You Want As A Technologist?
Posted on August 23, 2013
I was asked a question by one of the leaders of the company I work. The question was “How can we be more attractive to technologists?”
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Your Maturing Team
Posted on November 15, 2012
[REVISED 20121116 due to invaluable editing from a colleague. I’m a poor writer.]
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Ship It!
Posted on October 8, 2012
Below is a quote from my profile on our company web page.
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Centric Has a New Website
Posted on October 3, 2012
I work for Centric Consulting, and we have a new website. A lot of people have been working hard for quite a long time to make this happen and I think the results are outstanding.
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Dealing With a Large Test Suite
Posted on September 17, 2012
You have spent quite a bit of blood and treasure building unit, integration and automated functional testing on your project. You take a look back and now you have 30,000 unit and coded integration tests and 1,500 cucumber features with 4,500 scenarios. This number of tests provides an enormous amount...
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Speaking at IIBA Business Analysis Professional Development Day
Posted on September 12, 2012
On Friday, Sept. 14, I will be speaking on Behavior Driven Development (BDD) at the Business Analysis Professional Development Day at The Conference Center at NorthPointe in Lewis Center, Ohio.
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How to sign third party assemblies without compiling
You do it once in a blue moon so here is a reminder for how to sign that third party assembly you added.
Posted on July 17, 2012
Preface So you added a third party dll to your project and now you need to sign it. Sometimes you might not have the code to modify the assembly and add your strong name key. This post will describe how you can go about signing a third party assembly without...
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To the Cloud - Centric Consultings Recruiting Application
Posted on March 6, 2012
Each year Centric Consulting (the awesome company I work for) hosts a one day developer’s conference called Camp I/O. This is truly a great event. The 2011 incarnation took the form of a contest in which teams were formed and a project was undertaken. There were lots of fabulous prizes...
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Speaking at Code PaLOUsa 2012!
Posted on November 14, 2011
I’m very happy that my session “The Algorithms Still Count” has been selected for Code PaLOUsa 2012. I’ve seen a tentative session list and it looks very good. Code PaLOUsa 2012 is shaping up to be another great midwest conference!<div></div><div>Tickets go on sale 11/15 at 9:00 am. You can get...
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Code and Coffee has a web site (kind of)
Posted on February 4, 2011
About 18 months ago some folks came of with the idea of getting together in the mornings and hacking on some code. And so ‘Code and Coffee’ was born. In Central Ohio, Tim Wingfield got us all going.Fast forward to now and there sometimes 5 or 6 active Code and...
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Running NUnit Tests in TFS 2010 Continuous Build Environment
Posted on February 1, 2011
Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 does not provide an easy way to run NUnit test as part of the continuous integration process. Some pretty intense work goes into running those unit tests, and even more is required if build success should depend on unit test success. Download: NUnit Test Execution...
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Automated Deployment with TFS 2010
Posted on January 20, 2011
The automated/continuous deployment process can be performed in Team Foundation Server 2010 via MSBuild. We can tell MSBuild to ‘deploy on build’ which causes MSBuild to make a call to MSDeploy. To assist MSBuild in working with MSDeploy, we can specify parameters at Build Process Definition Time that are passed...
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The Algorithms Still Count
Posted on January 19, 2011
As per normal, CodeMash last week was awesome. I was lucky enough to be chosen as a presenter. The topic, "The Algorithms Still Count". In our world great frameworks and tools abound that help us be productive and build awesome applications that make our customers happy. Many of the inner...
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How Much Process Do We Need
Posted on October 17, 2010
I observed a little twitter conversation this week where one person was attempting to decide if “TDD” meant Test Driven Development or Test Driven Design. After quite a few posts one stuck out: "What I care about nowadays is shipping stuff." Couple this conversation with a blog posting by Nate...
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State Management in .NET
Posted on October 26, 2008
It seems I spend a lot of time talking to clients about .NET Session State Management and what effects their production environment might have on the user experience. Session state can be managed in several ways. I'll discuss four. Which way you choose depends on your production environment and existing...
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