Objective
I lead high-stakes product rebuilds and AI initiatives for agencies, banks, and campuses—pairing systems thinking with Midwest reliability. Every engagement gets architecture diagrams, incident playbooks, and measurable KPIs.
Lab Notes
Consider this your tour of the server room.
Objective? Build resilient platforms that blend AI, automation, and measurable outcomes—skills sharpened across 20+ years of enterprise releases, IVCC classrooms, and Fortune 100 fire drills.
“AI doesn’t automate me out of a job—I make AI my bitch.”
— Kevin Champlin
Core Skills
- Platform modernization (.NET → PHP/TypeScript, monolith → service meshes)
- Database & data warehousing (SQL Server, MySQL, reporting stacks)
- AI workflow design (copilots, prompt orchestration, RAG pipelines)
- DevOps + observability (CI/CD, telemetry, on-call leadership)
815 Media, LLC — Founder & principal engineer
Leading SaaS launches, agency rescues, and AI-powered marketing stacks for Chicagoland and remote partners.
Wells Fargo — Senior / Lead Software Engineer
Owned .NET/C# services, SQL tuning, and PCI-ready deployments supporting millions of transactions.
Illinois Valley Community College — Programmer · DBA · Sysadmin
Ran the full stack: ERP customizations, backup strategies, campus-wide networking, and faculty tooling.
LaSalle-Peru High School — Programming Instructor
Taught the next wave of developers while maintaining the labs they coded on.
2005 → Now
Shipping production code since the days when ASP.NET WebForms and Classic PHP shared the same deployment calendar. I’ve refactored COBOL for education institutions, tuned C# services for Wells Fargo, and still chase that perfect `git diff` before midnight.
Faculty + Firewalls
Adjunct instructor for programming courses at LaSalle-Peru High School, and at IVCC I wore the programmer/DBA/sysadmin hat—migrated flat files into SQL Server, rolled out their first mobile app, and eventually ran the campus systems stack.
Stack Globetrotter
- PDP-11 + DEC terminals → first love
- .NET, C#, Windows Server, SQL Server… all battle-tested
- Today: PHP 8.2, TypeScript, GraphQL, and clouds that auto-heal
Automation Fetish
From cron-driven cronjobs (meta, I know) to modern CI, I build the scripts that build the apps. Observability is non-negotiable: logs, traces, canaries, and synthetic tests are table stakes.
Full-stack trifecta
Designer eye, engineer rigor, DBA paranoia. Every layout is as intentional as the schema beneath it, and I’m equally comfortable in Figma, Vim, or a mysql prompt.
Pop-culture outlier
Never seen Star Wars. I’d rather optimize query plans, restore DEC terminals, or sketch service diagrams. Geek ≠ sci-fi trivia—it’s untangling real systems.
Mobile-first before it was cool
Built IVCC’s first campus mobile app when feature phones were the norm—syncing SIS data, building push workflows, and reverse-engineering APIs that didn’t exist yet.
Schema whisperer
Flat-file conversions, replication plans, and disaster-recovery drills are my idea of a good time. If it stores data, I’ve indexed it, partitioned it, and probably wrote the cron job that keeps it honest.
Language polyglot
Visual Basic, Classic ASP, .NET, C#, JavaScript, PHP, React, Vue, Java, you name it—I’ve shipped production code in it and still remember the compiler flags.
Uptime evangelist
From pager duty to chaos drills, I live for SLAs, SLOs, and dashboards. The stack doesn’t sleep, so neither do my probes.
2003
Hand-tuned PDP-11 lesson plans at IVCC while ghostwriting VB6 utilities for the registrar.
2008
Wells Fargo .NET + SQL Server war room: compression ratios, SAN zoning, and SSIS pipelines that actually passed audits.
2015
Illinois Valley Community College: programmer, DBA, sysadmin. Built the scripts that built the scripts—because backups deserve backups.
2024
815 Media, LLC: PHP 8.2, TypeScript, GraphQL, AI copilots, and edge deployments that auto-heal faster than pager alerts.
Credentials?
Call it lore instead of resume.
- 20+ years in production engineering
- Enterprise data migrations, PCI audits, and late-night pager duty
- Self-hosted lab: K3s clusters, Proxmox stacks, and retro consoles
Runtime telemetry
- Uptime: 99.999% obsession with observability
- Latency budget: sub-200ms or it didn’t ship
- Favorite opcode:
XCHG AX, AX(no-op flex)
Side quests
- Hex dumps for fun (and forensic audits)
- Retro console repair lab + Proxmox racks
- High school programmers coached into CS majors
Signal boosters
Need a deep dive on caching layers, SQL plan diagrams, or AI workflows that won’t leak data? I speak fluent RFC, vendor CLI, and plain English.