The thread through everything I have done is data translation — taking data that lives in one system’s logic and reshaping it into what another system, or the business, actually needs. I translate at every layer: data between systems, and systems to the people who use them.
More than thirty years of full-stack engineering, spent where business meets engineering. I came to it from writing — an MFA in screenwriting is audience analysis under another name — and that is still how I work: understand who is in the room, understand what they need, and structure the system and the explanation so they can act.
Twenty-eight of those years have been my own company — Spring Hollow Publishing, Inc., incorporated in 1998, and known as SiteShell since 2001 — with me as sole architect on most engagements, owning data modeling through deployment, hardening, and years-long support. The systems I build tend to stay in service, which is the part of the record I am proudest of.
One client kept me as their sole engineer from under $10M in revenue to over $100M. I built the enterprise HR, staffing and CRM system they ran on — multi-entity and multi-region workflow, full CRM and job lifecycle, invoicing integrated with their accounting, talent dashboards for timesheets and documents, and role-scoped back-office access. The company was later acquired by Randstad, where I architected the integration server that conformed US source systems into the global R-One platform’s warehouse. I also built the site they ran at the time,cellainc.com.
Peter, with his innate intelligence and deep knowledge of technology, was able to clearly understand our business needs, translate them into the technological equivalent and deliver the results that allowed us to grow to over $100 million in revenue… he was the first and only person we would call.
Rossi Bonugli, co-founder, Cella, Inc. (now part of Randstad US Technologies Group)
Peter is extremely professional, collaborative and a partner in the truest sense of the word… I highly recommend Peter and wouldn’t hesitate to work with him again.
Conor Smith, former co-CEO, Cella, Inc.
Nearly every system I have built is a permission system wearing a different hat: assets scoped to teams and regions, content filtered per authenticated user, selective access to sales versus invoicing versus administration across multiple business entities. A contest system I built in the 1990s let team representatives act for absent members — delegated authority inside a scope, which is the same idea I was still writing about in 2026.
MLTI (below, under earlier work) is where that scoping first ran at state scale: one grant, group, and role-based model spanning every district and every field servicer in Maine, years before "RBAC" was a phrase I would have reached for.
Public institutions with long lives, each still operating — and each still there to be looked up.
I built Alumni Finder, the application that tracked the post-program careers of SLSTP alumni, with map-based search and per-user accounts. It was used to demonstrate the program’s value to federal-level decision makers — a program official forwarded it to NASA Headquarters and asked for accounts to be provisioned for them. The program is still running today.
I built the servicer-facing application that tracked where each laptop was, who held it, and what repair state it was in, with group and role-based access across the state. MLTI began in 2002 as the first statewide 1:1 program in the United States and is still running in its 23rd year, deploying devices to over 80,000 teachers and students. Sources: maine.gov and Wikipedia, retrieved 2026-08-23.
I built an early version of the Institute’s site. The site today is not my work.
First Dan, Jidokwan Taekwondo
A black belt is a decade of turning up, which is the same thing the rest of this page is about.