The exploded view
The thing I do better than anything else.
An exploded view is an engineering drawing with every part pulled out and laid flat. The
relationships between the parts stay visible. That is how I see systems. Give me a company, a
platform, a pipeline. Within hours I hold the whole thing in my head: every part, every
connection, every place where the connections are weak.
It works the same at any scale. A company is a system made of smaller systems: what it sells,
who buys it, how it delivers, what it costs, how it is perceived. A platform is the same idea in
code. I see both the same way, micro at the bottom and macro at the top. The seams between the
two are where the gaps live.
The drawing: every layer of a system pulled apart, with SECURITY standing over all of them
Company
what it sellswho buyshow it deliverswhat it costshow it is perceived
Platform
authbillingmessagingjobsauditreporting
Data
customersordershistorytelemetrycatalog
Infra
serversqueuesmailproxiesbackupsmonitoring
Security
guards every layer aboveaccessdetectionresponserecovery
What that means when you hire me. I find the gap before it becomes the outage, because most
failures live between systems, in the handoff nobody owns or the queue nobody sized. Scope
comes out honest, because the map is already in my head when I quote. I can start anywhere: a
failing piece or a blank page takes the same first step. Build the map, find the load-bearing
parts, work those first.
It looks a little different depending on what the system is. For a company, the map is
commercial: revenue, delivery, reputation, where the leaks are. For a platform, it is technical:
the request path, the failure modes, the data that has to be right. Most engagements need both,
which is why I do both.
Security is the one element that does not sit in a layer. It runs through every one of them:
the credential at the platform, the isolation at the data, the perimeter at the infrastructure,
the promise a company keeps to its customers. The work is the same shape at every layer:
access, detection, response, recovery. That is the version of this drawing I have spent
thirty years learning to read. It is usually the fastest way to find what is about to break.
