Three decades of consulting.
Then the agents changed the plot.

It started with Macintosh labs for a school district and IT for an art e-tailer, taken on while I finished a mathematics and computer science degree. By 1998 I was building intranets at Abbott Laboratories; by 2000 I was writing content management for the American Medical Association in Tcl and Perl, cost-management systems for GE Medical in early J2EE, and commerce-engine internals at Mercantec in C++ — software behind twenty thousand storefronts, a decade before commerce became my specialty.

Centare came in 2004 and became the proving ground: nine years, consultant to team lead to managing consultant to vice president and partner. The work refused to repeat itself — WebSphere portals for Manpower, the Metasys building-management client at Johnson Controls, spreadsheet engines for Trane, Drupal for funeral directors, order management in .NET, steel-mill handhelds in J2ME, some of the earliest iPhone apps in Wisconsin. The village website too; I was my hometown's webmaster. The rule that formed here still holds: walk into any domain, be useful in week one, ship something that outlasts the engagement.

In 2013 I traded the partner seat for a specialty. hybris — later SAP Commerce — was where enterprise software met the storefront, and I had been circling commerce since Mercantec. Crown Partners put me on David Yurman's luxury storefront and GSK's global integrations; Lyons Consulting Group recruited me to build out their hybris practice, where I wrote a B2B accelerator that turned project kickoffs from weeks into days.

Nine years at Gorilla Group — later Wunderman Thompson, finally VML — as Associate Director of Technology: architecture and delivery for Gates, International Paper, Lubrizol, Crown Equipment, and Carhartt's global replatform, with pre-sales that closed real business along the way. Still consulting the whole time — the specialization shifted, the mode never did. The detours were deliberate: a cloud data platform for Choreograph on Google Cloud, AEM for the Marine Corps, WordPress for Timken. Range was always the point. A final year at Capgemini as Managing Delivery Architect — commerce and ticketing architecture for Universal Destinations & Experiences — closed the era.

In 2024 the lab opened: nights and weekends, my own money, my own repos. Leaderboard Fantasy; TutorPro, a tutoring-management SaaS built for my wife's business; eventually Composer, a multi-agent orchestration platform that dispatches parallel Claude, Codex, and Gemini sessions through a durable design–implement–review–merge pipeline. The experiments live at labs.jking.ai; the field notes are the writing on this site.

Consulting taught me to walk into anything. The lab taught the agents to do the walking. In May 2026 the lab became the day job: Software Tech Lead at Madhive — product development, not consulting — bringing agent intelligence into the platform. Thirty years in, the plot finally changed.