May 2026
When the VP of Architecture ships code
Five months and 305 commits later, I'd become something else: a Forward Deployment Engineer who never stopped being the architect.
Raleigh, North Carolina
I'm Todd Kaplinger, VP of Architecture & Innovation at NCR Voyix. Eighteen years at IBM, ninety-plus patents, and these days I don't just design systems - I help build them, working with AI agents every day and writing about what actually works.
What I do
I lead architecture and innovation at NCR Voyix, and I still write code every week. In 2026 I ran agentic migrations of production systems - Node to Go and .NET to Go - and ended up somewhere between VP and Forward Deployment Engineer: 305 commits in five months.
My team runs agents in the parts of engineering that used to be pure judgment calls: reviewing pull requests against our explicit standards, auditing containers, planning migrations. The interesting problems are no longer about getting AI to write code. They're about decisions, verification, and governance. That's what I write about.
Featured writing
Longer versions live on LinkedIn. This is the short list to start with.
May 2026
Five months and 305 commits later, I'd become something else: a Forward Deployment Engineer who never stopped being the architect.
Oct 2026
AI made implementation cheap. It made unwritten decisions expensive.
Aug 2026
Why I stopped hand-reviewing agentic PRs, and the checklist that replaced it.
Nov 2026
A green build after a port proves the tests ran. It does not prove the behavior survived.
Code
Istio is not just for microservices: securing Kubernetes services with the Istio service mesh. Conference material and examples.
Slides and supporting material from conference and meetup talks.
Proof of concept simulating proxying of Kafka messages between local and cloud deployments.
Configuration for deploying a simple Stellar testnet node.
Off the clock
Lifelong Atlanta Braves fan, which explains the navy. Big Carolina basketball fan, which explains the accent. Bentley University alum, which means I never got to enjoy either from a student section.
I tie most of life to music - the song that was playing when a kid was born, the band a friendship was built on. Some of my favorite writing has nothing to do with software, and it'll live here too.