I look for the place in a system where a person is quietly doing a machine's job, and I fix that. Over a decade across a handful of companies, it's always the same instinct: find the part that only works because someone remembers to do it by hand, and build something that doesn't need remembering. Finding those parts means carrying the whole system in my head first — you don't notice what's being held together by hand until you can see the shape of everything around it.

That instinct looks different depending on the system. Sometimes it means reverse-engineering an undocumented process until it no longer lives in one person's head. Other times it's replacing a workflow that needed a code change every time with one driven by configuration instead. Once, it was a script that ran a multi-year pricing change across an entire billing platform without anyone opening a spreadsheet. Most recently it was the knowledge itself: engineering a skill system my team's AI tools and developers read against, so what used to live in my head is something the repository can answer.

I care as much about which engineers can own a piece of a platform without me as I do about the platform itself. A team where one person is the single point of failure is just a slower version of the same problem, which is part of why I've spent years with Code Connector, mentoring people into their first developer jobs.

Where to find more: Writing: coreydmccarty.dev Resume: corey.mccarty.dev LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/coreydmccarty