About this blog

Hi, I’m Jim - thanks for stopping by. Here you’ll find some thoughts, tips, and how-to’s for some of the technology I’m currently working or playing with. These days, that means a lot of serverless, event-driven architecture, NoSQL, and data processing on AWS and a lot of Node.js. Hopefully you’ll find something useful for your own journey. If so, please share!

About me

I’m the co-founder and CTO of Rhythm Software where I help associations and non-profits change the world one member at a time.

I love learning and building. A new fact, a new language, a new skill, a new tool, a new technique, new deck - I love it all. But I get most excited when a product or capability that I had a hand in creating makes someone else’s life a little bit better.

For me, my interest in technology started with a database I built for my baseball card collection way back in the 80’s. In the 90’s, I turned a hobby into a career building sites for the world wide web fad - time will tell if that thing lasts 😏. Plenty of ASP in Visual Interdev, co-location facilities, and oversized jeans in that decade! I did an awful lot of C# .NET and SQL Server and was an early adopter on the public cloud in the 2000’s and into the 2010’s. These days, pretty much everything I build is serverless - so a lot of YAML and Node.js against DynamoDB and other AWS services.

I’ve played most positions in an IT department. I ran and punched down miles of ethernet. I administered everything from Novell to NT to AD, cleaned malware, and set up PBXes. I built out servers, racks, routers, and VLANs. I wrote a ton of code in many different languages. I’m proud that a lot of it is still in production. I built and ran operations, development, and support teams. For the last decade or so, I’ve been a CTO trying to share my enthusiasm for building with my team and the tech community.

Recently, I’ve been big on serverless and NoSQL. That probably has something to do with my experiences in all those different roles. I know first-hand what we could accomplish if we didn’t have to build, license, manage, secure, maintain, and scale our own servers / VMs / hosts. And the entrepreneur in me is excited about how capital efficient it makes launching a new venture. Ideas that were previously impractical or not fundable are suddenly possible and I can’t wait to see what the community does with this power.

I love playing ice hockey. I prefer right-wing, but play center too. I’m based in Atlanta with my lovely and brilliant wife Kelli and our two dogs.

Jim

Photo by Vladislav Klapin on Unsplash