Author & IT Director

Twenty years in IT taught me
what leadership actually costs.
So I wrote it as fiction.

Fiction and field notes on the transformations that don't make it into the case study — the real ones, with the people still in them.

Books

We Don't Need Experts book cover
The Novel

We Don't Need Experts

A Novel about IT Leadership

Thomas Hudson is an IT Director inside a health plan's real, messy transition to Agile — the managers who mistake control for leadership, a vendor engagement that goes wrong in almost every way one can, an HR process that turns a good employee's integrity into the thing on trial, and a platform cutover the whole company is quietly betting on.

It isn't a book about ceremonies and frameworks. It's about what it actually costs to lead differently: mentoring instead of hoarding what you know, telling the truth in the retro instead of the hallway, and trusting the people doing the work.

If you've ever sat in a “transformation” that wasn't, this one's for you.

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Prompt, Then What book cover
The Companion Guide

Prompt, Then What

A Vibe Coding Companion Guide

The nonfiction companion to We Don't Need Experts. Vibe coding isn't reckless by nature, it's reckless by neglect: skip the requirements, and the fastest way to build something becomes the fastest way to build the wrong thing, securely wrong, at scale, in production, before anyone notices.

This guide won't teach you how to write a prompt. It teaches what to know before you write it, and what to check after the code comes back — drawn from twenty-three years of watching smart people build things badly, and a few things well, rarely knowing in advance which one they were about to do.

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About the Author

JR

Josep Rivera has spent more than two decades building technology inside industries that don't forgive mistakes — financial services, healthcare, and insurance — where a broken deployment isn't an inconvenience, it's a compliance incident. As an IT Director, he has led enterprise platform modernizations, large-scale CRM transformations, and the early wave of applied AI work now reshaping how regulated companies handle customer interactions, always under the kind of scrutiny that leaves no room for shortcuts.

Earlier in his career, as a consulting practice leader and principal engineer, he architected technology solutions for Fortune 500 companies across several regulated industries, helping large organizations standardize how they design and deliver software instead of just talking about doing it better. Along the way, he became one of those engineers who ends up leading Agile transformations less because it's his job title and more because he can't watch a team ship half-working software inside a “Sprint” that never had a goal in it.

He works today at the intersection of enterprise architecture and applied AI — large-language-model integrations, platform modernization, DevOps automation, and the unglamorous governance work that decides whether any of it survives contact with production. We Don't Need Experts is his first novel, written from that vantage point: two decades of watching organizations reach for a methodology's language while resisting its substance, and a career-long conviction that the people closest to the work usually already know what needs to happen, if anyone in the room is willing to listen to them.