Hello. I am Sigmund.

Hello. I'm Patrick, aka Sigmund. I've been at this software game for a while now, since 1999 (and working in IT since 1997). I've written a lot, but mostly for my customers. Long, tedious technical docs—specs, reports, etc. I used to blog regularly, back in the early days of Webapper, my software company that I co-founded in 2001. I also had a few technical publications here and there, but I think most of that stuff is in the dust-bin of Internet history.

(I've written some non-software stuff too, like my Master's thesis ("Shout at the Devil: A Conversation with Leviathan - An analysis of child welfare work in America"), or a popular version I wrote for a magazine ("Child Abuse by the State"), or a book about cancer I wrote with my wife. But those are all for a different blog!)

I've been through a lot with my team. Lots of "eras"--the original dot com mania, the Rich Internet Application craze, the smartphone/mobile revolution, the cloud, crypto, and now, of course...AI. I think this last one is bigger than all the previous ones combined, but that's a story for another day.

We've also been through lots of transformation at Webapper. Not the abstract kind you read about in a report from a consulting firm. The real kind. We've gone from old-fashioned, monolith, server-based applications, to the cloud and cloud-native software and systems. Along the way, we swapped out programming languages, architectures, business plans, business models, team members, etc. Again, not for fun or frills, but out of necessity, to make sure we stayed current, and sharp.

The past 5-10 years have been especially demanding. Oh, did I mention we're also trying to pivot from services to SaaS? Through this stretch, I got kind of quiet, and really stopped writing publicly at all. That's changing now, as I emerge from this metamorphosis, rub my eyes, and try to figure out what happened.

I'll share my notes here.

I am Sigmund, and thanks for listening.