Doyle Turner

Professional Stuff

I build worlds for a living and for fun. Professionally that means cloud platforms, migration strategy, and the infrastructure other engineers build on. Unprofessionally it means a D&D campaign, a board game shelf with a structural engineering problem, and a folder of games I will definitely finish.

These days I'm leading a legacy identity-verification platform onto Azure — the architecture, the order things move in, and the Terraform everything else gets built on top of. Before that: Microsoft twice, information security at a national mortgage lender, CTO of a healthcare startup back when it was small enough to fit around one table, and a year running my own consultancy. Somewhere in there I spent a stretch teaching digital forensics and computer crime to college students who mostly wanted to know whether you can really recover a deleted file. (You can. Usually. It's less cinematic than they were hoping.)

The thread

If there's one thing running through all of it, it's that I like building the thing that lets other people build.

A Terraform control plane isn't interesting on its own. It's interesting because a room full of product teams can now move without each one inventing its own answer to the same question. The security program I built at Microsoft spread a lot further than I could have carried it myself, and that was the entire point — it was never about me securing everyone's code. It was about everyone securing their own.

I run Dungeons & Dragons for the same reason. A DM doesn't tell the story. A DM builds a world with consistent rules and hands it to a table of people who will immediately do something you did not plan for. Good infrastructure works the same way: you don't control what gets built on it, you just make sure the ground holds.

What I'm actually good at

Legacy systems that need to become cloud systems without a rewrite that never ships. Security that lives inside the pipeline instead of on a checklist somebody signs at the end. C#, TypeScript, and Clojure, across Azure and AWS. Terraform and Ansible. Teaching — workshops, conference talks, mentoring, a couple of semesters of actual grading.

I've been the person who breaks it and the person who has to explain to an auditor why it didn't break, and the second job made me much better at the first.

I also have a reasonably good instinct for which of a company's problems are technical and which are three people who haven't talked to each other.

How I work

Incrementally. I named a company after it. Ship something small, find out what you got wrong, ship again. Big-bang rewrites have an outstanding track record of being announced.

I've seen enough failed projects to be suspicious of confidence, including my own. The best thing I ever delivered was a platform rewrite that several teams had already failed to finish, and most of what made it work was subtraction.

The rest of it

I draw and paint. I write — poetry, and other things. I read constantly, and not only the useful kind.

None of that is separate from the work. Painting is composition under constraint. Poetry is ruthless editing. Board games are systems design with the rules printed on the box. Running a campaign is stakeholder management with dice.

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Kentucky-based. Hopeless optimist with a tiny realist trapped in my head — he's usually right, which is the annoying part.

Currently accepting: interesting problems, good arguments about architecture, and party members who read their own spell descriptions.