Thirty-five years of building software — from an internship in Finland in 1991 to AWS architecture now, by way of Munich telecom, city procurement and ten magazine websites.
I split the year between Chicago and Bengaluru, where my family is.
01 — Work
Everything, in order, since 1 August 1991. Hands-on and running teams, alternately, throughout. A two-page version of this exists for people in a hurry.
Ripple Group, Inc. · Remote
Architectural design and system mapping for porting a core rent-to-own application to AWS. Authored the cloud infrastructure and application architecture documentation guiding deployment, steered an offshore development team day to day, and held the onshore client relationships.
Orbit Future Academy · Jakarta — remote from Bengaluru
Education technology applications.
Breakthrough Technologies · Evanston, Illinois
Directed the engineering lifecycle for a suite of enterprise educational applications, assessment tools and LMS software. Delivery schedules and budget across concurrent projects; recruited, mentored and supervised developers and QA engineers; stayed in the code through reviews and critical PHP components. Primary technical contact for clients.
ServerCentral Turing Group · Chicago
Bond, acquired by Newell Brands · New York
A high-scale web application for automated gift and handwritten-note delivery — by robots. Architected the backend in Node.js (HapiJS) and designed the MongoDB aggregation pipelines behind the core API. Agile team of five.
Breakthrough Technologies · Evanston, Illinois
Technical lead on an online high-school testing platform built on PHP, TAO and Drupal 7. Engineered a business intelligence application for a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company in Node.js.
Pacific Gas and Electric · San Francisco Bay Area
Hybrid mobile applications for the gas, energy supply and nuclear power plant lines of business. Ten programmers, onshore and offshore.
Veritas Health · Greater Chicago
Maintenance of a medical publisher's sites — spine-health.com and arthritis-health.com — plus custom Drupal 7 modules and jQuery.
TIAA-CREF · New York
Emergency maintenance, reverse engineering, and a replacement for an HR compensation web application.
American Media · New York
Engineering operations for ten high-traffic digital publications — Men's Fitness, Shape, Radar Online among them. Hired and managed eight developers; architected and executed the full system overhaul and database migration of three primary sites from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7.
iVillage, NBC Universal · New York
Technical lead for porting the Home & Garden vertical to Drupal 6.
Innovation Ads · New York
Technical and managerial leadership of eight developers. Built a prospect management system in PHP, ExtJS and MySQL.
Condé Nast · New York
City of Chicago · Department of Procurement Services
Project manager for the Online Economic Disclosure Statement system, replacing a paper submission-and-approval process. Gathered requirements, translated them for IT, ran QA and coordinated user acceptance testing. Also built the department's portal — specification library, contract finder, training calendar.
Chicago Public Schools · Procurement and Contracts
The department's web portal end to end: supplier database, solicitation administration, approval requests, board report finder. Also tested the district's Oracle Financials 11i migration and wrote and delivered the training.
Keystone Consulting Affiliates · for Riverside Publishing, Chicago
Desktop software in Visual C++/MFC letting school districts analyse how their students performed on standardized tests, including the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Then a guidance system helping high schoolers pick a course of study and apply to institutions.
Siemens · Bombay, and Siemens Nixdorf · Munich
Seconded to Munich to build the interface for a Synchronous Digital Hierarchy operating system in X Window/Motif, contributing to the system design and its test and simulation suite. In Bombay, ported SIGRAPH CAD-3D from the Apollo Nexus 3500 to the HP 9000/720.
Kirloskar Computer Systems · Bangalore
A graphical user interface for testing software, written in C on UNIX with Curses.
Raha-automaattiyhdistys · Espoo, Finland
Where it actually began, on 1 August 1991. An interface between the Psion Organiser II and a Printer Products printer, written in OPL-II; then one between a Squirrel data logger and a Sun 3/50, in C under X Window and XView on OpenLook.
02 — Away from the desk
Each of these started with a posting. The work put me somewhere new, and I made the most of where it left me.
I grew up wanting to see snow. I finally did in Finland, and first tried skiing there in 1992.
In Munich the cheapest way to reach the Austrian slopes was the ski school bus — so I took a lot of lessons. Later I skied with groups out of New York.
Since then: the US, Austria, Switzerland and Japan. Chile and Argentina too, which means some years I ski in August.
Twice over fifty miles an hour.
At the end of my time in Munich I took two weeks and went south alone — Italy, the south of France, Spain.
These days I travel a few times a year with my partner. Turkey, Thailand and Indonesia most recently.
English natively. French from a Diplôme Supérieur in literature at the Alliance Française, Bangalore, 1988.
German since Munich in 1992. I reached C1 with the Goethe-Institut in 2026.
03 — Education
04 — Contact
Best by email.