Software & Systems Engineering

Turning complicated operational problems into understandable systems.

I work across the full stack, from C, Perl, Java, and Oracle enterprise software to modern PHP, JavaScript, Python tooling, APIs, and static publishing systems.

The consistent thread is systems thinking: identifying boundaries, assumptions, failure modes, and the smallest architecture that can remain reliable over time.

Philosophy

Engineering Philosophy

Good engineering makes complexity legible before it tries to automate it.

Understand the whole system before optimizing one component.

  • Make assumptions explicit and failure states observable.
  • Prefer simple, inspectable architectures over unnecessary machinery.
  • Automation should remove repetition without removing human understanding.

Automation should remove repetition without removing human understanding.

Problems

Problems I Solve

The most valuable work usually begins where a system has accumulated complexity, operational risk, or assumptions no one has revisited.

  • Legacy-to-modern system transitions
  • Workflow and build automation
  • High-volume transactional and synchronization systems
  • Reliability problems that fail silently
  • Cross-disciplinary architecture spanning software, data, security, and operations

Approach

How I Work

I decompose systems by responsibility, state, data flow, and failure behavior. That exposes where complexity is essential and where it is accidental.

I then build in small, verifiable layers, preserving working behavior while reducing ambiguity and operational burden.

Selected Projects

Work that makes the method visible.

Finding Your Neighborhood

Privacy-preserving community architecture

Finding Your Neighborhood explores how people can discover communities without surveillance, behavioral profiling, or centralized data collection.

The project also demonstrates my approach to AI-assisted engineering. AI accelerated implementation and challenged assumptions throughout development, while architectural decisions, integrity verification, and publication standards remained under human control.

FYN applies the same philosophy I bring to AI systems: minimize unnecessary data collection, keep behavior inspectable, and preserve user control.

  • Static GitHub Pages architecture
  • Python build system
  • Build-time integrity verification
  • Referrer-scrubbing architecture
  • Client-side matching and discovery
  • No database
  • No tracking
  • No advertising

Multi-Model AI Verification Workflow

Calendar Defender

A practical engineering project exploring collaborative AI review rather than depending on a single model to produce solutions.

Independent AI models reviewed architecture, challenged assumptions, explored edge cases, and critiqued implementation approaches before human synthesis.

The result was not simply better code. It was a repeatable engineering process that improved transparency, reasoning quality, and confidence in technical decisions.

Custom Static Publishing System

A Python builder that turns structured JSON into a portable, versioned website.

  • Reusable templates and collections
  • Build-time validation
  • No runtime application or database

Enterprise Synthetic Student Data

Perl generators producing more than one million privacy-preserving Oracle records for performance testing.

  • Representative randomized data
  • FERPA-aware testing approach
  • Repeatable enterprise-scale generation

Experience

Representative experience.

Zee Creative · 2011–Present

Lead Web Developer

Lead developer and systems architect for a large, long-lived portfolio of production websites and integrations.

  • 250+ active web environments
  • Custom application and integration development
  • Technical standards, migration planning, launch QA, and incident response

SunGard Higher Education · approximately 8 years

Lead Software Engineer

Technical lead in enterprise higher-education software, working across large Oracle systems, performance testing, defect analysis, and release delivery.

  • Synthetic data generation exceeding one million records
  • Defect cross-reference and recurrence prevention
  • Enterprise release estimation and delivery

Technologies

Core technologies and areas of focus.

Languages

PHPJavaScriptPythonPerlJavaCSQLHTML/CSS

Architecture

APIsAutomationStatic GenerationEnterprise SystemsIntegration Design

Focus

ReliabilityMaintainabilityFailure AnalysisPrivacyVerificationTechnical Leadership

Business Value

Why systems thinking matters

Organizations rarely suffer from a lack of tools. They suffer from unclear boundaries, duplicated responsibility, invisible assumptions, and systems that no longer match the work.

Systems engineering creates leverage by correcting those structural problems instead of adding another layer on top of them.

Contact

Let's Talk

For technical leadership, architecture, modernization, or complex systems work, contact me directly.

Contact Julie
The right solution is usually the one that makes the system easier to reason about.