About Me | Nicholas Skitch

Discovering my calling

Not just some warm body sitting at a desk collecting a paycheck. Computers, and specifically automation, have been a passion of mine since a young age. Here's me pictured in the late 80s on the family 8088 with a 1200-baud modem. I spent nights dialing into BBSes to trade files, play door games, and chat. Years later, I became a SysOp running my own board.

That curiosity carried forward. While still in high school, I was already working as a Unix system administrator, getting hands-on with IBM RS/6000 and Sun Solaris servers. Hearing the hum of the machines, the buzz of fluorescent ballasts, and the steady rhythm of keyboards was the moment I realized I had found my calling. I wasn't just interested in computers, I was interested in making systems work reliably, especially when humans were no longer in the loop.

That instinct to remove friction and replace it with repeatable automation has shaped my career ever since.

Over the past 15+ years, I've focused on turning fragile, manual deployment processes into durable systems that teams can trust. At Moody's Analytics, I designed and built CLDeploy, a multithreaded Go-based CLI that installs and upgrades Moody's CreditLens platform both on-prem and in AWS. What began as a consultancy project grew into core infrastructure now used to deploy and maintain environments for over 175 banks and fintech customers worldwide.

My work has centered on the hard parts teams tend to avoid: automating PostgreSQL backup and restore workflows with selective object control, orchestrating AWS resources directly via the Go SDK, and building deployment pipelines that are auditable, repeatable, and resilient under pressure. These systems are not demos or internal toys. They are production tools relied on by CloudOps teams and customer-facing engineers in regulated financial environments.

Along the way, I've led migrations from single-tenant to shared RDS architectures, built containerized onboarding services integrated with secure MFT platforms, and mentored engineers in idiomatic Go and systems-level thinking. Whether working independently or embedded with enterprise teams, my focus is always the same: simplify complex systems without hiding their reality, and leave behind tooling that makes the next engineer's job easier, not harder.

At this point in my career, I'm most effective where deep technical context, automation, and long-term ownership intersect. I care about how systems behave at 2 a.m., how they recover from failure, and how quickly a team can reason about what's happening when something goes wrong. That mindset started with a modem and a BBS, and it's the same mindset I bring to modern cloud platforms today.

hobbies

Road trips with no particular plan
Estimating the calories in a Baja Blast so I can undo them on a treadmill
Furiously writing software like the future is watching, John Connor-style
Abandoning Red Hat and throwing the red fedora in the trash in favor of Ubuntu
Big minimalism
Keeping up with the constant, creative ways my Winnebago asks for money
Writing code under the close supervision of Gus, a Border Terrier who does not approve of most architectural decisions unless it involves a treat

What's up with the name Build Maestro..

I don't mean to sound pretentious with the name "Build Maestro", this was just a lighthearted nickname given to me during my time at Seagull Scientific as Release Engineer for the company. It just so happened I needed a name for a blog at the time, and this fit the bill!

Click here to read old blog

What brought me here

It was this same passion that brought me to what I consider the center of it all. The Bay Area. I read the Steve Jobs biography and was inspired to be where I feel the action is. Even though I had a full time offer from Expedia, I decided I'd follow my dreams.

About Me: Personal Statement

I'm a software engineer focused on building reliable delivery and automation systems for production software. My work spans backend development in Go, PostgreSQL data management, and database backup and restore workflows, along with AWS API integrations that support build and release processes. I care about correctness, repeatability, and designing systems that hold up under real operational pressure.

About Me: News

Stay tuned for updates and news about my work and projects.