Career path

Principal Engineer · SkySwitch / BCM One

2025 — now

An opportunity to learn and optimize the SkySwitch NetSapiens-based platform. Lately I’ve been playing more of a leadership role in our software department leading what is in title a Site Reliability team focused on our software across the whole global BCM One organization.

I’ve mostly been learning how to fully embrace agentic LLM-based tooling to do a job similar to one I’d been doing for years. The primary thing I’ve been tackling is ensuring we’re measuring important things in a complex system and then being able to adjust to fix those issues.

I have a lot of friends here old and new so it’s a pleasure to work here.

Principal Engineer · Fall Forward

2023 — 2025

We started a little too early here. If we had been able to take advantage of the real multiplier of tools like Claude Code we would have easily hit our goal of launching 5-6 SaaS companies per year. Just the speed of iterating that would have been made possible makes me wonder if our ideas about finding product-market fit would have given us an advantage.

I really learned a lot about frontend development here where I hadn’t spent any time on that before. I also learned a lot about TypeScript which I really enjoyed.

Anyway this was an opportunity to work with Alan Rihm again so I jumped at it.

VP of Engineering / SVP of Cloud Services / Principal Engineer · CoreDial / SkySwitch / BCM One

2005 — 2023

From 2005 - 2021 it was CoreDial a company I helped build from the ground up. One of the two founding employees along with the three founding partners we basically learned how to become voice guys as data and server guys. We helped create a whole business model that inspired many competitors. Our goal was to be the best in the world at enabling our partners to sell, deliver, manage, and invoice for cloud communication products and services. I truly think we were that. Things we built there continue to be used to this day.

It’s impossible to list the things I learned here in any short amount of time. I was involved in so many successes, failures, too many very long nights to count. This company started when I only had one baby and now I have two adult daughters. People I worked with and for, hired, are now friends for life.

I navigated an insane number of challenges here and came out stronger and smarter. I might have to write dozens of posts on my blog to come close to explaining what this was about. Also of titles held here I was:

• VP of Engineering
• SVP of Cloud Services
• Principal Engineer

All at various times. I think there might have been more titles. It wasn’t about that to me and still isn’t although I do like having Engineer in my title.

VP of Engineering · CentraView

2003 — 2005

CentraView came out of an idea Alan had at ASPRE which then he called The Glue. It was a CRM before the age of big CRM SaaS companies. A small group of us worked together to build this. Here I learned a ton about building real software, and about outsource development and hiring teams to help get things done. One of the best things about CentraView and LLMs is that Alan recently has taken the J2EE platform we built and basically abandoned as open source and turned it into something he’s using to run his current venture: CentraView Lives

System and Network Engineering Consultant · CGFNS

2002 — 2003

The Coalition for Graduates of Foreign Nursing Schools is a non-profit that was doing a major overhaul in their processes and brought in consultants to build them an Oracle-based software system and needed someone with networking and Solaris sysadmin experience to help bring their systems online and properly configure them. Today for me that whole job would be a week or two nailing down some ansible playbooks and documenting how everything worked. But back then we did everything by hand. Also probably terraform because let’s be honest a company like that wouldn’t self host it would be a full cloud deployment.

After ASPRE closed I got this job through Devon Consulting and worked here until Alan called me to work on CentraView.

Senior Network Engineer · ASPRE

2000 — 2002

I met more than a couple lifetime friends here, it was my first time working for Alan Rihm, though I worked with him earlier. I learned more in these two years about Linux, programming, networking, security just in the crucible of having to do the impossible.

My trip to Mesa, AZ for two weeks to stand up a dedicated hosting offer of like 1800 servers was an amazing thing.

Associate Electrical Engineer · Northrop Grumman

1999 — 2000

First job out of college. It’s what really iced for me that startups were way more interesting for me than big behemoth companies. As always though I learned a ton and got to work with some neural networks, and some weird network systems.

Engineering Staff · PREPnet / Verio

1996 — 1999

PREPnet is where I learned what the Internet was. Also InterMapper (I still love that software). And Verio is where I learned what acquisition and stock options were. It was an amazing part-time and co-op job to have while in college. Also Verio bought PREPnet and Surfnetwork which was Alan’s company. So this is where I met Alan and went on to work for him at ASPRE, CentraView, CoreDial, and Fall Forward.

Firmware Engineering Co-op · Unisys

1996 — 1997

This was my second Co-op at Drexel. Here I learned from an important person in my life Steven Leibowitz about the stock market. And this is really where I learned how computers work. We were programming the firmware on an IO Controller card in a Unisys A Series Mainframe. It was a custom chip with custom opcodes and IIRC a 108-bit word. It was very interesting and fun. And I had a 486 running Windows for Workgroups as my workstation.

Co-op · TDEC Labs

1995 — 1996

My first co-op job was in the Drexel Engineering Curriculum Labs. These were the labs that were used to teach the Freshman Engineers, so doing this work meant making sure the lab was ready for the classes all the equipment was working, cleaning up. Preparing some of the lab materials. It wasn’t what I wanted for a co-op and I didn’t realize there were opportunities in round B of the co-op program so I took it. But I still learned a lot here and got a chance to take some programming courses while I was on campus. I also saw the ad in the school paper for the PREPnet job so it was a huge point in my life.

Laborer · A contractor who knew my Dad

1994

A summer job digging ditches, breaking concrete, demolishing old bleachers in an auditorium, shoveling stones and dirt to cover pipes. Just working very hard for some cash pay. I learned a lot about setting boundaries between work and life. Also the righteous rest of the exhausted especially on a day I worked construction from 5 AM - 2 PM, ate dinner and then worked a closing shift at CVS.

Crew Member / Shift Supervisor · CVS

1992 — 1996

Started as just a cashier and do whatever around the store. Learned here that most people you work with just don’t actually want to do work, that continues to hold true until today. They let me “do the magazines” during football season to keep me on the books but not need to work regular shifts. Eventually they offered me a small raise to be a shift supervisor and have keys to the store. I worked here until I could get a much better job at PREPnet.

Janitor or something · Woolworth

1991

My first real job, worked two or three times a week just doing the cleanup at the end of the day over the summer. Break down boxes, take out trash, clean the grease trap in the diner that was in the store. Sweep and mop the floors. Just a couple hours but I got some money and some real work I had to do. I learned what it meant to have a regular job.