About
Quinton Greene
I've been writing code since 2003, and a good share of that time went to unlearning what the first tutorials taught me. These days I live on the backend, in databases and the systems around them, and this is where I think out loud about it.
I started writing code in 2003, when I was eight, which mostly meant breaking things I didn't understand and then breaking them differently. A fan site for Muse. A guestbook. A login form guarding nothing of any value. The tutorials I learned from were already years out of date, so a fair amount of what I know is stuff I had to unlearn first.
I spent my teens and early twenties in Django and ended up on the backend more or less permanently. My working theory is that every web application is a database with a website stapled to the front. That isn't a criticism — it's just what the job is.
Most of my career since has been contract work and short stints at small and medium-sized businesses. A lot of it was under NDA, and the rest belongs to companies that didn't hire me to talk about them, so I don't name names. The thread running through it is data that needed to move: half a dozen doctors' offices switching systems, two civil engineering firms, and a mix of other businesses that had outgrown whatever they started on and needed years of records to arrive on the other side still meaning what they meant.
The longer version of that story is Creovia. I was working at a charter school management organization when I noticed three of its systems had never been put side by side, and in 2021 I co-founded a company around what fell out when I did. Today I'm Principal Software Architect at True Access, where half the job is building the engineering team in-house.
Somewhere along the way the work became as much about people as code. I've built three development teams now, from five developers to eighteen, and my recent roles have leaned more toward architecture and leadership than writing code every day. I still love the engineering side, and I try not to drift too far from it.
I write here because it's how I find out what I think. I re-read my own posts an unreasonable number of times looking for the thing that's off, and I usually find it a week after publishing. Publishing is the deadline that makes the re-reading happen.
So nothing here is a finished conclusion. It's thinking in public, which seems more useful to put on the internet than a set of opinions I'd then have to defend.
If you want to talk about work, or about something I got wrong, email is the best way to reach me.