Starting at the Beginning
When people ask me about leaving my job after nearly eight years, they ask me what do I do now? Answering this question can sometimes be interesting. To mimic the narrator from “Me, Myself and Irene”, it’d be better to begin at the beginning.
In November of 2025, I was burned out, and the on-call was too much for me to handle anymore. It was affecting my health, my marriage, and every aspect of my life. So I decided to leave the company and ponder my next steps. The team I was on was great and probably was one of the best ones I had ever been on. Even though we were a team of roughly 20+, we were in a very, very, very large pond, and changes don’t come quickly.
Don’t be confused, either; my eight years here were a huge learning experience. A lot of good and interesting things to learn during those eight years, along with new concepts, meeting people way smarter than I, and being a part of something that has grown significantly.
Soul Searching
For most of November and December, I did a lot of soul-searching, trying to figure out what in the world I want to be when I grow up. At nearly 50, having been in the industry since 2000, I seriously considered everything outside the technology field.
Finally, my wife, aka my better half, said I should be a contractor/consultant. Once she said that, it clicked in my head, and I started pondering what I liked most about technology: the newness, the learning, the project.
Once the idea in my head was mentally solidified, next up was figuring out what type of consulting I wanted to do. Having been in the technology field, I have seen new terms and descriptions of careers come and go. However, one finally showed up that most accurately describes what I enjoy most: Platform Engineering.
The Why
Although I am still learning all the ins and outs of Platform Engineering, it most accurately describes my major interest: building new platforms to help companies run their software as efficiently as possible.
What you see now is Granite Dog Systems’ home base. The plan is to offer pre-packaged kits that I will deploy for clients across various cloud platforms, allowing them to focus more on their product development and avoid the heavy, often expensive learning curve of building infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines in the cloud, and then managing them. Of course, I will also do ad hoc work for migrations where my packages do not easily fit and may require heavy customization. Regardless of pre-packaged code or something heavily customized, they’ll get runbooks and a quicker ramp-up to something they can manage moving forward, or more succinctly, operational readiness.
Next Steps
Over the coming months, I plan to blog about that journey here to share with folks what I am doing and who I am. I’ll admit, this is the coolest project I have ever been a part of (fyi, I’ve already built a prototype) and the scariest.
I have a lot to learn, not only the technology (which has been like drinking from a firehose), but also all the business aspects. Getting the right lawyer to review business formation documentation and template contracts, and finding a CPA to help ensure my taxes are done right.
Although I am scared because marketing isn’t my thing and will be a skill I will have to perfect, I also realize that if this business doesn’t succeed, I will have learned a lot and built a functioning application.
Now, when people ask what I do, I am a Platform Consultant. I help teams stop wrestling with their infrastructure and return their focus to the applications they want to build. Soon, Granite Dog Systems will be ready for clients.
