Another year almost wrapped up, which means another year of reflection and perspective.  I try to stay inspired as much as I can on a weekly basis and one of the ways I do this is by logging any good quote I hear throughout the year.  Whether the quote comes from a book I'm reading,... Continue Reading →

Sometimes I take the weekly drive into work for granted.  It's approximately 10.4 miles door to door from my house to USAA.  However, along this narrow construction-ridden stretch of I-10, I sit in bumper to bumper traffic with my fellow North SA/Boerne friends dragging through the morning commute with me.  Morning commutes are double-edged.  The... Continue Reading →

Circa 2014 ... I wrote this a while back but couldn't help to post it on this blog. Enjoy 🙂 Sometimes in life, your well intentioned plans don’t always work out the way you want.  When I found out that I would be a dad for the first time, the 9 months leading up to... Continue Reading →

If you ever get bored in your corporate 8 to 5, or just need a new fresh perspective? If so, I have a suggestion for you. Go hang out with some of the newer employees in your organization. Listen, observe and be humbled. Not too long ago I decided to have lunch with a group... Continue Reading →

It’s Monday morning, 5:00AM, iPhone built-in alarm has been “snoozed” 3 times so far since the first buzz at 4:30AM. You do the math. In the next minute I will make the most important decision of my day …. A) Do I get up now? B) Do I snooze for another few 10 minute rounds of... Continue Reading →

On January 3rd 2019, Cloudera completed the merger of equals with Hortonworks creating the worlds first enterprise data cloud and kick starting their ambition to provide the worlds leading next generation data platform. Below is a decomposition of this merger of equals and my personal analysis of this transaction. Background Cloudera (NYSE: CLDR) is an... Continue Reading →

Back in July of 2017, I sat in a ball room at the Elian Hotel in San Antonio, TX for our Executive MBA kick-off retreat with 33 strangers who had a similar "what did I sign up for" look on their face. At the time, the idea of pursuing an MBA was new, exciting, ambitious and if I'm being honest a bit idealistic. It was also very scary to think I would be adding something else to my existing commitments for 22-months. I already had a demanding job, 3 young children and a wife with a growing career of her own. The MBA was something that Jess and I had talked about for years and as I stared down the last few years of my 30's it was a "now or never" type of decision.

I can remember as a kid, being obsessed with Kitt from Knight Rider.  This Black Pontiac Firebird instantiated as a super computer deployed to the world to fight crime was simply beyond cool.  Lately, it seems that some of the most classic science fiction over the last 50 years has turned out to be a good barometer of the future ...

I'll never forget the call that evening.  It was March 9th, 2015 and at the time I was an IT manager for the software engineering team responsible for building and maintaining the USAA mobile app for both Android and iOS users.  On the phone, was my lead developer alongside in the transport van with two other team mates on their way back to the hotel from a business trip visiting our Guadalajara 3rd party development team for the week.  Their voices were excited, giddy and ambitiously optimistic as they pitched me on the idea of releasing a brand spanking new USAA app for the upcoming release of the world’s first Apple Watch set to debut on April 24th, 2015 ...