I've been a professional programmer and architect for over 15 years. In that time, I've delivered systems to the U. S. Government, the military, banking, finance, agriculture, and retail industries. Along the way, I have shared my painfully-won experience by mentoring, writing, and speaking. My work has spanned domains as diverse as B2B exchanges, retail commerce sites, travel and leisure sites, an information brokerage, and applications for the military and intelligence communities. This spring, the Pragmatic Programmers published my book "Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software". Most books on software architecture and design aim for QA. "Release It!" is all about surviving the real world.