About Me

I'm Annah, Director of Software Architecture & Development at a book publishing company, and the owner of Bluechip Software Solutions.

Over the course of my career, I've worked on the kinds of problems that don’t always have an obvious answer: modernizing legacy technology, simplifying complex systems, improving customer experience, consolidating databases, and building practical automation.

My work sits at the intersection of software engineering, enterprise architecture, and business problem-solving.

Reshaping the Technology Landscape

For the past decade, I've been reshaping the technology landscape and workflows of a 50-plus-year-old book publishing company.

An organization with decades of history accumulates technology. Applications are built to meet immediate needs, databases multiply, similar systems develop independently, and processes evolve around the limitations of the tools available at the time.

My work has involved addressing that complexity: modernizing legacy applications, consolidating systems and data, improving operational reliability, and finding ways to reduce the manual work required to keep everything running.

Doing this work has meant collaborating across technology and business departments, understanding their distinct needs, and connecting those needs to practical technical solutions.

Modernizing and consolidating systems

Over the past decade, I've modernized legacy platforms, consolidated applications and data, and improved how the organization develops, deploys, and maintains its software.

Fewer, simpler systems

  • Led the consolidation of a fragmented database environment from 54 databases to 11, eliminating duplicated and underused data, shrinking the potential attack surface, and reducing the effort to maintain, monitor, and secure what remains.
  • Merged multiple internal customer applications into a single customer lookup application.
  • Migrated the organization's FTP servers from internal hosting to vendor-managed hosting, eliminating the need to maintain them in-house, with significant cost savings and less operational overhead.

Modern platforms, faster delivery

  • Migrated legacy systems from ColdFusion 8 to .NET.
  • Moved source control from Team Foundation Server to GitHub.
  • Replaced manual deployments with automated GitHub CI/CD pipelines.

Self-healing systems & logging

Application errors used to be emailed to a distribution list that no one monitored. Now applications detect known failures and correct them automatically. When a person is needed, a ticket is created and assigned to the right developer. I also led the development of a centralized health dashboard that shows the current status of all applications.

The Result

Routine maintenance and operational work dropped significantly. The environment now needs two developers to support it instead of five, freeing the team for new features, updates, and genuine defects instead of recurring operational issues.

AI and Intelligent Automation

Together, the customer support automation I built has contributed to a70% year-over-year reduction in customer support tickets. It works in two layers:

  • Website chatbots: I led the development of chatbots built with Microsoft Copilot Studio agents and fuzzy search. They help customers find answers on their own, before a ticket is ever opened.
  • A digital assistant: I built a digital assistant that handles the requests that do come in. It identifies spam and duplicates, merges follow-up tickets, routes requests to the right teams, a nd responds to predictable inquiries.

Explore the Work page for more about these projects and their implementation.

Earlier Work in Election and Public Services

Before my current role, I helped modernize Champaign County's systems for election administration and public services. The projects included:

I also built an election judge management system that handled registration, assignments, notifications, timekeeping, and payroll data.

These projects brought key election and public service processes online, improving accessibility and streamlining administrative workflows.

Education

Master's Degree in Information Systems

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science

Google Cybersecurity Certificate