Comcast

In early 2019, I joined Comcast as a Principal Architect. My organization was in the middle of a management reorg and looking to migrate applications from OpenStack to AWS. At the same time, Comcast's Chief Architect had mandated Concourse as the corporate CI/CD platform.

The problem: the internal Concourse platform had no golden pipelines. Every engineering team was literally reinventing the wheel—writing their own Terraform modules, figuring out how to call the Change Management API, solving security scanning independently. The same patterns duplicated hundreds of times across the enterprise.

ServiceNow and the Change Management API fell under my architecture oversight. I worked with the Change Management Process team—the team that ran CAB (Change Advisory Board)—to review pipelines before teams could get access to the Change API. Every Concourse team had to go through this review because there was no standardization.

I was given an exception to the Concourse mandate. SEED had capabilities that Concourse didn't yet support—and I was building a platform that would actually solve the problem rather than perpetuate it.

Within nine months I was promoted to Senior Director of Architecture. My architects provided oversight for engineering teams transitioning out of OpenStack. We onboarded them to SEED, helped them restructure their applications, containerize them, and make them cloud-native.

The key differentiator: SEED enforced how things were done. Testing and security were baked in. Design patterns were standardized. Teams using SEED got immediate access to the Change API because the pipeline itself enforced compliance.

This is when I saw it clearly: DevOps had become the new waste. The Concourse teams were all solving the same problems independently—and worse, they each had to go through CAB review to get Change API access because there was no way to trust their pipelines.

Beyond SEED, I created and institutionalized Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) across the organization. This wasn't just my team creating them—engineers across the org could provide feedback on proposed patterns. Those ADRs directly informed how SEED's design patterns were built.

The insight: when standards are documented formally and enforced by infrastructure, teams stop reinventing the wheel. ADRs became the source of truth that SEED's golden pipelines enforced automatically.

This experience planted the seed for what I'm building now with OutcomeOps—where ADRs become queryable knowledge that AI uses to generate code matching your organization's patterns. Same philosophy: make the easy path the right path.