🔥 The Plumbers, the Electricians, and the Guardians of the Galaxy

An ode to the unsung heroes of engineering — and the quiet systems that make innovation possible.

We built the house.

It looked perfect — glass walls, open layout, solar panels.

Then the first rain came… and nothing drained.

This reflection is for the people who make sure it does drain — the QA testers, the DevOps engineers, the security specialists, the DBAs.

The electricians and plumbers of our systems.

The ones who make sure the shiny architecture actually works.

During this sabbatical, one pattern refuses to leave me alone — a realization that’s followed me through every engineering chapter I’ve lived:

We keep confusing heroic multitasking with healthy engineering systems.

We under-hire for the foundations, over-stretch our engineers, and then act surprised when the beautiful house leaks.

This is not theory. It’s lived experience.

The Spreadsheet That Told the Truth

At HealthFusion, we were scrappy.

Four senior engineers, one ANT script, and a whole lot of copy-paste.

Deployments rotated like a chore wheel: move files, run scripts, verify manually, and hope nothing slipped.

Because I can’t help myself, I tracked it all in a spreadsheet.

The numbers were blunt: between babysitting deployments and manual verification, we were already spending the equivalent of a full DevOps salary — just fragmented across four engineers doing work they weren’t hired to do.

We had confused being busy with building a system that works.

I went to my then-boss and said, “We’re on VSS, budgets are tight, but where there’s a will, there’s a way. We need a DevOps engineer.”

Enter Hue Nguyen.

Hue didn’t complain about constraints. He just started building guardrails.

That’s what good engineers do — they work through limitations, not around them.

Around the same time, we were deep in the GitFlow vs. Trunk debate.

I’ve never believed in over-parenting engineers.

Trunk felt risky — but it also felt honest.

So we went with Trunk-based development.

We adopted Bitbucket, stitched together CI/CD, and after ten months of persistence, had weekly automated deployments.

Those were fun days — a little chaotic, a little revolutionary.

To help everyone internalize the new rhythm, we looped a Deming’s Principle slide deck on the engineering TV.

The slides flashed quotes like “Bring the pain forward” from Jez Humble and “Bake quality in” from Deming.

My favorite was a cartoon chicken on an assembly line proudly boxing a carton instead of laying an egg — a reminder that quality isn’t something you tack on later.

We laughed every day. And somewhere between the laughter and the repetition, the mindset clicked.

“Bring the pain forward” became our quiet battle cry.

The result?

We went from quarterly buggy releases to weekly stable releases with fast recovery.

Same product, same team — the only difference was the plumbing.

Investing in DevOps, CI/CD, and quality systems became the inflection point that turned us from scrappy survivors into a company that could scale — and eventually be acquired for $165M.

The Power of Real Guardians

Parallel to DevOps, we invested in quality tools — modular, Lego-style test automation that empowered engineers rather than burdening them.

James, who joined us after two decades at Intuit, was the calm in the storm — a craftsman who believed that elegance wasn’t optional.

John McDonald, our DBA, transformed how we thought about the database.

Before him, we were Google-powered DBAs — guessing, patching, hoping.

With him, we began to ask the right questions:

How do you evolve a single production database safely?

How do you even attempt A/B deployment when you have one shared instance?

He made the impossible sound like routine maintenance.

These people didn’t stand on stages or brag in town halls.

They quietly made everyone else possible.

Looking back, I see it clearly:

The real inflection point in our success story wasn’t product-market fit.

It was the moment we hired our guardians of the galaxy — the people who kept the system alive.

Foresee: When You Start from the Right Instinct

At Foresee, I arrived already converted.

Greenfield projects have their own luxury — you can choose your habits.

We decided early:

• We will test.

• We will automate.

• We will wire CI/CD into how we work, not bolt it on later.
  
  

Scott wrote the tox script and internal tooling that kept us honest.

Shruti, our lone QA champion — a one-woman army — caught what others might have waved through.

Ernesto brought the magic of Infrastructure as Code, and his attention to detail made our compliance work almost elegant.

And yes, we brought back the TV again.

This time, it proudly displayed the PR queue in real time.

No fancy dashboards, no Slack nags — just pure visibility.

When everyone could see which pull requests were waiting for review, no one wanted to be that person holding up the flow.

Public accountability worked better than any policy.

Review times dropped. Quality rose. And culture quietly shifted.

Again, the same pattern: quiet technical guardians, loud compounding effects.

When Everyone Is Everything (and No One Really Is)

As my journey continued into larger organizations, I began seeing the same anti-pattern at scale:

engineers “also doing” DevOps, “also doing” QA, “also acting” as DBAs, “also” managing security.

Yesterday’s Google-powered DBA has become today’s ChatGPT-ed DBA.

Different tools, same fragility.

Let me be clear: I’m not criticizing engineers.

If anything, I have enormous respect for the way they step up — “I’ll deploy,” “I’ll patch,” “I’ll debug at midnight.”

But when brilliant engineers are forced into doing four jobs out of habit, fear, or pride, you don’t get four excellences — you get four diluted disciplines.

The system becomes weaker.

The releases riskier.

The craftsmanship shallower.

And the people themselves burn out quietly.

So here’s my gentle nudge to both sides:

To engineers —

It’s not a demotion to say, “We need a real DBA.”

It’s not weakness to say, “We need a DevOps partner.”

Be a little selfish. You’ll shine brighter when you’re not pretending to be five departments in one body.

To leaders —

If your best engineers can’t ask for help without fearing it’ll be seen as weakness,

you haven’t built a lean team;

you’ve built a quiet crisis.

MDLand: The Reminder

At MDLand, I saw the pattern once again.

When Mike, our DBA, joined, his attention to detail helped us migrate two decades of data from on-prem systems to AWS SQL Server and MongoDB with care and precision.

It didn’t feel like outsourcing; it felt like acknowledgment.

A recognition that some work is so important, it deserves an owner.

A Sacred Duty (and a Call-In)

The DevOps engineers.

The DBAs.

The QA champions.

The people wiring automation, watching logs, ensuring we don’t trade stability for speed — they are not overhead.

They are the lifeline of innovation.

They’re the ones who make sure our beautiful house doesn’t flood the moment it rains.

To the guardians of the galaxy I’ve worked with — Hue, James, John McDonald, Scott, Shruti, Ernesto, Mike — thank you for quietly holding up the world so others could ship, pivot, and dream.

To everyone building organizations:

Stop confusing heroic multitasking with healthy systems.

Budget for the plumbers and electricians before you build another glass wall.

Your future self — and your innovation engine — already know this is the right answer.

Acknowledgment

Gratitude to my then bosses who trusted the data and made the hard calls, even when budgets were thin.

And to every engineer, QA, DevOps, DBA, and product partner who came along for the joy ride — thank you for showing up for the craft and the culture.

I may have been the instigator, but without your belief and partnership, none of this would have taken root.

These lived experiences taught me that sustainable innovation isn’t born from heroics — it’s built on shared ownership, trust, and a well-laid foundation.