About James

I started in 1998, still a junior in high school. Twenty-eight years later the titles have changed and the job hasn't: something has to stay up, and somebody has to decide how. That decision is the work — architecture, infrastructure, DevOps, cloud, security — and I'd rather make it with the people who own the budget than after they've set it.

What that has looked like in practice: data center migrations, Zero Trust rollouts, endpoint fleets pulled under one platform, identity governance stretched across three clouds and twenty-odd SaaS tools, multi-million-dollar infrastructure under governance. The measures I care about are the ones you can check afterwards. Availability. Recovery time. Hours of manual work that no longer exist. The licensing line on next year's budget.

I use AI and workflow automation heavily, and I'm choosy about where. It's good at the repetitive middle of an incident and poor at the parts that need judgment; knowing which is which is most of the value. I hold a Bachelor's in Computer Information Systems with a minor in cryptography, and I've been recognized for leadership and innovation in enterprise IT.

Next: the technical skills I actually use, or the resume with the dates on it.