Welcome, I'm James Earlywine. I've been building web applications professionally for 17 years.
I started my journey building custom full-stack web applications for small businesses, then completed my MBA and graduated to larger enterprises.
As a solutions architect, I am focused on:
- Your Business
- Customers
- Revenues
- Costs
- How do you measure/track success?
- Factors that drive success
- Risk Factors
- Competitor Intelligence
- Product Differentiators / Market Positioning
- Company "Moats" / "Unfair Advantages"
- Monetization Strategy
-
Your Product Strategy
- Why do your customers use your app?
- How do you attract and retain customers?
- Product/Software Development Lifecycle
- Current Roadmap and Backlog
- Product Branding & Styling
- Visual Designs
- User Personas, User Journeys, User Pain Points
- What data is collected to understand how users interact with your product?
-
Your Technology Strategy
- Map of product specs to technical specs
- Business & Application Events
- Architecture/DFD Diagrams
- Sequence Diagrams
- Data entities
- Data Security & Privacy Compliance
- Network Security & Topology
- Application Security
- Caching & Indexing Strategy
- Testing Strategy
- Data Application Map
- Service Map
- Infrastructure and Scaling
- Source & Dependency Management
- Tool Chains & Developer Experience
- CI/CD Strategy & Tooling (Build, Test, Deploy, Rollback, etc)
- Observability Framework (Logs, Alerts, Incident Management, etc)
- Operational Controls
- Disaster Recovery
-
Your Operations
- What are the SLAs for your application?
- Who do users contact for customer service?
- What on-call requirements exist to support this application in production?
- How do you track and respond to production issues (service outage, service degradation, feature defect, etc.)?
- How many high-severity incidents do you have per week?
-
Your People and Culture
- How do you plan & prioritize your deliverables?
- How do you communicate and work as a team?
- How comfortable are people in sharing their thoughts, ideas, and concerns?
- What is the general feeling on the team?
- What is the work/life balance?
- What is the mix of personality types?
- How much time is spent in discovery and sharing?
- How much time is spent addressing technical debt?
- How much time is spent discussing and improving team dynamics?
- How is performance evaluated? (team, individual contributor, manager)
Ideally, much of this is already visible to all stakeholders. I like to work with teams that are transparent about their business, product and technology strategies.
I consider myself a Generalist, and I hesitate to ever call myself an expert at anything. :)
- I like working on a dynamic team - where each member provides good leadership in one moment, and good followership in the next.
- I like working on a flat team of seasoned professionals, who engage in healthy intellectually-honest debate and can have fun in the process.
- I prefer to work on teams where we collaborate creatively, but also strike a healthy balance with "heads down" time to focus and deliver.
- I'm comfortable working alone, and also enjoy pairing to figure things out together.
Fun facts about me: I'm an INTJ-A (Myers-Briggs). I can un-scramble a rubiks cube in less than 2 minutes. I like to play guitar, sing and hang out with my five-year-old son. :)
You can locate me here on the DISC chart:
If you're into Lumina Spark, you can read my full Lumina Spark Portrait or my abbreviated Lumina Splash.
TLDR summary:
