Queries·Joins·Results
Twenty-five years of stories from inside enterprise technology.
Migrations. Outages. Systems that shouldn't have worked and did.
Systems that should have worked and didn't.
The people in between.
Stories and musings. More of both coming.
Started out headed toward philosophy. Pivoted to psychology. Ended up in enterprise software. In retrospect, this makes complete sense.
Spent the early years as a product person — figuring out what users actually needed, designing flows, writing specs, arguing about what "done" meant — before UX had a name and before product management had a job description. Cared about what software should do before caring about how it worked.
Learned their language along the way. How developers thought, what worked for them, what didn't. That understanding made it possible to help evolve the way we built things — the assembly line — over and over again. Never finished. Never the same twice.
The job grew. Eventually someone said: you should probably have a title. So I picked one: VP of Strategic Technology. Which meant whatever I wanted to work on.
This is a site about stories. Twenty-five years of them — migrations, outages, systems that shouldn't have worked and did, systems that should have worked and didn't, and the people in between. Some musings too. More of both coming.
One person. One consulting shop. Twenty-five years of the same client, which says something about one of the two of us — possibly both.
a22 Consulting, LLC
-- migration log · cloud lift
$1.5 billion. On-prem to Azure. One weekend.
It took eighteen months of rehearsal. Migration work at that scale isn't a project, it's a practice. You run the play until the play runs itself. You find every edge case before the edge case finds you at 2am on a Sunday.
The actual cutover weekend went. Warehouse shipped Monday morning. ERP hummed. Phones stayed quiet. We'd earned it.
The hardest part of the whole thing — the thing that nearly unraveled eighteen months of engineering discipline — was print drivers.
Zebra label printers in Orlando. One guy on the floor who could replicate the slowness. Microsoft Enterprise Event Management on the line. Engineers dragged in. Hours of telemetry, logs, network traces.
I was in bed. Following along on my phone. Contributing absolutely nothing to the print driver situation.
The answer, eventually: drivers were old. You can model the systems. You can't always model what's plugged into them.
-- historical record · the bunker · 2005–2009
-- field_notes.context
Told the CEO we needed to "bunker" the team to ship AX 2009.
He took this literally.
Built us an attic.
We lived there for four years.
It worked.
-- field_notes.quotes
"What you lack in accuracy you make up for in confidence."
— A. Sylvia to C. Plefka, circa 2009
Said in a meeting. The specific meeting is lost to history. The truth of it is not.
-- field_notes.quotes
"It's just a join away."
— the team, origin unknown, used constantly
Said when two seemingly unrelated things are actually one query away from each other. Also used by non-technical people to sound technical. Also used romantically. Don't ask.