Prologue: The Agency Years
Five and a half years at Delphic Digital, Sr. Front End → Lead → Director, and the patterns that came out of that work and became the way I architect platforms today.
case studies
Twelve years, condensed. A prologue from the agency era at Delphic, then nine years at Vanguard FAS. The thread: introduce the right thing at the right time, protect the system around it, and let the compounding do the work. Each chapter is a real piece of platform work that made the next chapter possible.
the arc
A prologue + six numbered chapters, the platform story start to finish.
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Prologue 2011-2017 -
Chapter 1 2017-2020 Early Influence: Driving Modern Front-End Adoption
Introducing Vue.js to Vanguard FAS at a time when the division was constrained to legacy frameworks, and embedding it into the platform without fragmenting ownership.
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Chapter 2 2020-2023 Building the Design System: Platform Creation and Enterprise Standardization
Turning a fragmented front-end into a unified, framework-agnostic design system that powers advisors.vanguard.com and ~50 advisor tools.
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Chapter 3 2021-2023 Framework-Agnostic Architecture: Future-Proofing the Front End
Designing Meridian as a framework-agnostic system so it could support Angular, Vue, and AEM simultaneously, and outlast whatever framework comes next.
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Chapter 4 2022-2023 Design System + CMS: Bridging Engineering and the Business
Deploying Meridian components into Adobe Experience Manager so marketers and content creators could ship on-brand experiences without engineering bottlenecks.
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Chapter 5 2023, present Governance and Standards: Sustaining the Design System at Scale
Holding the line on ownership, boundaries, and architectural direction as adoption grew, the discipline that lets a design system actually last.
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Chapter 6 2025-2026 Expert Insights: AI Platform Leadership + Responsible Rollout
Leading Vanguard's AI-driven portfolio analysis product from architecture through internal launch to an advisor pilot and public announcement, and what I would force earlier next time.
technical + leadership deep dives
Companion pieces. The design system × AI architecture, how I lead engineers and set technical standards, taking on the real-time analytics engine the GenAI product depends on, and building the design system’s quality gates hands-on.
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Technical Deep Dive 2024, present Design System + AI: The Three-Layer Architecture
How the Meridian design system was extended into an AI-ready platform, IDE metadata at build time, an MCP server with 10 tools, and agentic workflows that enforce architecture from inside the IDE.
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Working Style ongoing How I Mentor and Contribute
How I work with my team, the way I think about mentoring, the way I think about contributing code, and why those are the same engineering instincts at different scales.
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Leadership Deep Dive 2026 Owning the Analytics Engine Beneath the GenAI Product
Leading the team to take on the real-time analytics engine our GenAI advisor experiences depend on, a priority shift that added production-grade, API-first platform scope without dropping the GenAI work it underpins.
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Hands-On Deep Dive 2026 Trust and Assurance in a Shipped Design System
How I make a shared component library something other teams can trust: gates that block a bad release, tests that run in a real browser, evidence published with every version, and visibility into what is actually running. Built hands-on, then handed to the team.