Principal Solutions Architect
Most of what I'm paid for happens before the code: understanding a business well enough to know which problem is actually worth solving, then drawing the boundaries so a team can build it without tripping over each other.
What keeps me interested is the two ends of that — the business case that justifies the work, and the person who has to use the thing on a Tuesday afternoon. Everything in between is negotiable.
A one-button voice recorder for a 95-year-old blind man who wanted to tell his life story. Custom Raspberry Pi HAT, multithreaded C++ firmware, studio-grade audio capture, a crash-safe cloud pipeline, remote fleet deploy. Twenty days from ordering parts to a working unit in his hands.
IMAGE SLOT — the school-bus-yellow unit with the red button.
Drops in here when the hero photo lands (ACTION-PLAN item 2), which is also the trigger to
revisit the image-led direction in 2b-2.
The expensive failures I've watched were not badly built. They were correctly built answers to a question nobody had checked. I spend the early time in the domain — with the people doing the work — because that's where the real requirement lives, and it is rarely the one written down. It's also where you find out what the thing is genuinely worth to the business, which is the number that should decide how much system it deserves.
Systems break at their boundaries: front end against back end, digital against analog, software against a person's hands. Most of architecture is deciding where those lines go and then making each side's responsibility narrow enough to state in a sentence.
An architecture nobody else can extend is a liability with good intentions. The deliverable is usually a working system and a handful of people who now build that way by default.
I take on a small number of outside engagements.
lrm@integrity-design.com
Twenty days across five disciplines. The acceleration was real and it landed nowhere near where I expected — which means the size of the effect depends on a property of the engineer, not the model.