Erik Voldengen · Pacific Northwest

I fix things.

Web applications, mostly. Sometimes they're broken, but usually they work exactly as they were built. Either way, I see the same thing: they're not solving the problems the people using them are having. And that's where things get interesting. A lot of the job is walking into a system nobody fully understands any more, working out why it does what it does, and moving it onto current infrastructure without stopping the business while I do it. I've been at this long enough that I've probably seen your particular problem before.

Lately the work has been direct mail. I've built a system for my team to manage and proof commercial print jobs and deliver them to the printer — but that was just part of it. I helped spec the artwork and the file-preparation standards, refined the InDesign templates with the art team until they held up in daily use, and worked with the printer to sort out how it would all run. And don't get me started on the mail. I love the mail. We needed presorting, Informed Visibility for tracking, secure destruction, and IMBs — most of which meant working directly with USPS. Each of those was its own problem to solve, and getting them all to run as one process, every day, was another. The part I like best isn't even the code — it's being on a team that pulls off something none of us would have managed alone.

If you've got a ColdFusion or Lucee application that needs rescuing or moving to AWS, or a print and mail operation that needs sorting out, I'd like to hear about it. I answer my email.

erikv@erikv.com