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barnickle.dev

About

I'm a Staff Software Engineer with 25+ years in healthcare technology. I currently work at AcuityMD building AI-powered workflows and backend systems that process billions of patient records.

My background spans enterprise patient tracking at HCA, EDI systems at Global Healthcare Exchange, and a decade-plus of building distributed systems where the data is sensitive, the stakes are real, and the edge cases are always weirder than the requirements.

These days I'm particularly focused on agentic development — using Claude Code as a genuine thought partner for architecture, not just autocomplete — and on what it actually means to build AI-native systems in regulated environments.

When I'm not architecting things, I'm thinking about complex systems from unexpected angles — including what tabletop game design teaches about emergent agent behavior and decision loops.

I live in San Diego with my amazing wife and partner and three furry co-pilots.

What this site is

A place to share patterns, opinions, and lessons learned from building real systems. The work examples are anonymized — you won't find proprietary details here — but the architecture patterns and approaches are real.

Topics I write about:

Get in touch

Find me on GitHub.