Troy Gould

At Laurentide Controls, growth isn't just about expanding our reach – it's about building the foundation for sustainable success through operational excellence. As we continue to evolve, we're reinforcing our structures with three key strategic priorities: Scalable Processes: We're ensuring our processes are structured, reproducible, and ready to scale with our growth through modern tools and proven methodologies. Optimized Performance: Our structured approach identifies inefficiencies, standardizes practices, and measures performance to reduce lead times, minimize errors, and generate measurable savings for both our team and clients.  Proactive Governance: With a dedicated team focused on transparency, we're documenting, monitoring, and continuously improving our processes to foster effective collaboration across departments and align with our strategic vision. This Business Process Management approach allows us to analyze, structure, and formalize our operations to enhance organizational resilience. Our clear ambition? Making operational excellence a sustainable competitive advantage that drives performance, client satisfaction, and the longevity of our activities. When processes work seamlessly, everyone wins – our team, our clients, and the industries we serve across Eastern Canada.

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What does community building mean to you? Is it bringing people together over drinks? Is it learning in public to improve our collective well-being? Is it holding our craft to a higher standard, together? Last night was my first Cloud Native Calgary event, and it reinforced a belief: this community can meaningfully shape the tech ecosystem in Calgary. In a world where AI is moving faster than most organizations can adapt and systems are only getting more complex, we need stronger engineering practices around infrastructure. In other words, it is time to get back to DevOps. Christophe Fargette from Red Hat shared a great demo on Internal Developer Portals and Red Hat Developer Hub, built on Backstage, and why good platform experiences matter. It was humbling and energizing to see others striving for the same outcomes I have been working toward over the past two years: sustainable, scalable paths for teams, not heroics. The reality: many organizations, from startups to enterprises, still do not know where to begin with DevOps and lean heavily on software engineers to "figure it out" on top of product work. That does not scale. Hiring more engineers without changing how we work only increases complexity. We need to look honestly at the umbrella of DevOps and clean up our practices: platforms, pipelines, guardrails, and golden paths. ​ Practice transformation takes time. A practical first step is to understand the current health of your delivery and infrastructure practices, then ask: where can we safely automate, and where can a platform unlock better outcomes for both developers and the business? Shout out to Kevin Evans and his team for this amazing experience. #DevOps #ShopTalk #InternalDeveloperPortal #PracticeTransformation #PlatformEngineering #CloudNative #CNCF #SoftwareEngineering #YYCTech #ABTech

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The CRA just posted an RFP asking for a local solution to generate Java code. Canada is finally waking up to what we should have been building all along. We spend $50B+ annually on R&D. Less than 2% of that IP gets commercialized. Over half gets assigned to foreign companies. The gap isn't invention. It's translation. Vision to execution. Idea to Production-Ready code that stays here. When a federal agency asks for local AI tooling to build software, it's a signal. Not just procurement. Recognition that exportable IP and sovereign capability matter. This is the bottleneck I've been watching for years. Brilliant innovators who can't build alone. Risk-averse capital that won't fund pre-revenue deep tech. A translation layer that costs $400k or doesn't exist at all. The RFP is small. The shift it represents is not.

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Documenting a recent infrastructure win because I wish I’d seen more posts like this when I was figuring this stuff out. We run data pipelines that process medical charts and generate codes (CPT, ICD, HCC). The old architecture was SQS-based with worker pools. It worked, but visibility was terrible. Charts would hang or fail silently, and we’d have no idea what happened to them. We migrated everything to Temporal. Game changer for observability. Now I have full traces of every workflow, every agent call with its prompts and outputs, every processing step. OpenTelemetry integration pipes everything to Datadog. Debugging went from “let me spend 3 hours in logs” to “here’s exactly what happened.” Then I built an MCP server that queries both Datadog and Temporal. Ask it about a failed chart, get the root cause in seconds. Connected that to Cursor. Now when something breaks, the flow is: identify failed chart → MCP surfaces the issue → AI suggests fix → push code → validate chart processes → done. End-to-end debugging and fixing that used to take a day now takes under an hour, sometimes just minutes. Not trying to sell anything here, just sharing what worked for me. Happy to talk details if anyone’s going through similar infrastructure decisions.

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Most IT conversations lately seem to be stuck in a loop: budgets are tighter, teams are leaner, and the legacy "manual" way of managing infrastructure is starting to hit a breaking point.   On March 5th, MOBIA is teaming up with Red Hat in Halifax to talk about a different path forward.   The goal isn't just a technical deep dive into containers. It’s about the actual business impact of modernizing the platform—specifically, how to stop the "heroic effort" it takes to keep legacy systems running and how to build a predictable exit ramp for virtualization costs.   The session focuses on what’s hitting local directors' desks right now: Operational Stability: Cutting out the manual "touch time" so the team can actually scale. The VMware Shift: Using OpenShift Virtualization to stabilize infrastructure and lower TCO. AI Readiness: Making sure rack space is capable of handling data-heavy workloads before the demand hits. If you’re in the region and navigating these changes, join MOBIA and Red Hat to see what a modern operational standard looks like locally—and how to get there without a "rip and replace" disaster.   See registration details in the comments below!   #HalifaxTech #AtlanticIT #OpenShift #VMware #Infrastructure #BusinessVelocity #MOBIA #RedHat

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The telemetry pipeline implementations that fail almost never fail for technical reasons. They fail because someone skipped the boring stuff. After watching dozens of organizations go through this process, the pattern is crystal clear: The teams that succeed treat pipeline adoption like organizational change, not just infrastructure deployment. Here's what trips people up: → No clear objectives. "We want to modernize" isn't a goal. "Reduce ingest costs by 30%" is. → No telemetry inventory. Most organizations have zero idea what data they're generating or who uses it. This audit typically surfaces 20-40% of data that can be eliminated immediately. → Fuzzy ownership. A centralized pipeline changes power dynamics. If nobody owns cost outcomes and policy enforcement, the pipeline becomes "someone else's problem." → Going too big too fast. The teams that migrate everything at once? They're writing postmortems six months later. → Opacity kills adoption. "We dropped your logs, trust us" is how you get shadow agents and workarounds. We built a 10-point preparation checklist covering the work that matters, before you talk to a single vendor or write a line of code. Link 👇 https://lnkd.in/gYCMNN5b #telemetry #observability #platformengineering

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It’s frustrating to see that the productivity gap between Canada and other advanced economies has widened in recent years. Meanwhile it’s inspirational seeing how advanced technology is being applied in other countries. While most Canadians are busy debating affordability, lowering taxes or increasing minimum wages, more attention can be paid on using technology to truly improve standard of living by increasing productivity. I don’t think there’s a shortage of talents or inventions coming from Canadians, but actual productization and commercialization of technology does not seem to occur frequently enough in Canada. What can individuals like myself do? Aside from working on products to help businesses identify and close productivity gaps, one thing I can think of is to bring back and share experience I have in the industry back to the university. Hopefully this could align students’ expectations and inspire better collaboration between academics and commercial application of technology. Do you agree? What would you suggest?

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Closing out #CTOCraftCon: Toronto with a powerful reminder: great teams are built when you invest in people - not just output. In our final session, Andrew Potapov, Director of Engineering at Leap Tools, is sharing strategies from “Building Careers, Not Just Teams: A Guide to Performance Management and Career Frameworks.” This isn’t about check-the-box appraisals, it’s about creating clear, meaningful paths for growth that serve both your people and your product. Key takeaways as we wrap the day: • Career frameworks should enable, not limit. • Growth thrives on clarity, not confusion. • Investing in performance and potential is how you build teams that last. A thoughtful, fitting close to two days of learning, connection, and community. What a ride.

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Architecture Tuesday In most automation suites, problems don’t appear on day one, they show up when the suite starts growing. A small UI change suddenly breaks a long list of tests, and teams begin firefighting instead of adding new coverage. When you dig deeper, the problem generally isn’t with the tool. It’s how the framework was setup. If tests are responsible for everything from data setup, business rules, page interactions, and validation, any change in the system becomes expensive to maintain. The suite becomes tightly coupled to details which should live elsewhere. A layered design changes this dynamic. - Tests focus on behavior. - Services own business logic. - Validators enforce correctness. - Tools remain interchangeable. The result is a suite that grows without collapsing under its own weight. Scale comes from structure, not volume. #TestAutomation #CleanArchitecture #QualityEngineering #SoftwareArchitecture #AutomationArchitecture

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