The person behind the systems
Assistant Director of Identity Solutions at UVA. Systems architect. Mentor. Theater technician. Amateur radio operator. Lifelong learner.
In my own words
I've spent my career building and stewarding the infrastructure that organizations depend on — the kind of systems that mostly go unnoticed when they're working correctly, and become everyone's problem when they don't. Identity and access management is a particular form of this: the authentication and authorization systems I work on at UVA quietly underpin almost every digital interaction across the university.
I came up through systems administration at Norfolk State University, where I spent over a decade learning the fundamentals of keeping things running reliably for people who have better things to worry about than infrastructure. That's the instinct I've carried forward through everything since: technology in service of people, not the other way around.
At UVA, I joined the UVACollab platform team and grew through senior engineering and management roles — eventually helping guide UVACollab through its multi-year retirement and migration to modern services. From there I moved into the identity portfolio as Manager, Identity Architecture & Solutions, where I helped lead the team through an extended director vacancy and, eventually, into the Assistant Director role. The line below the surface is consistent: less a path of accumulating titles, more of accumulating responsibility for systems and teams that matter.
Beyond the institution, I do community and standards work for the higher-ed identity world. I'm originator and co-author of ARMS & SARM — a draft interoperability specification and open-source reference implementation aimed at the IAM governance gap that SCIM didn't reach: attestation and recertification. Presented at InCommon BaseCamp 2026, picking up cross-institutional collaborators since. Higher-ed identity is one of those domains where the work gets multiplied when institutions can build on shared foundations — and I'm trying to contribute to that.
Outside the office, I do sound design, engineering, and lighting design with Four County Players in Barboursville, Virginia — recent credits include Sweeney Todd (sound), The Game's Afoot (lighting), The SpongeBob Musical (sound), and the outdoor Shakespeare at the Ruins: The Comedy of Errors (lighting). I also mentor young technicians through UVA's Teen Arts Program and Four County's youth productions. And I hold an amateur radio license (KK4LHO). I've found that the same skills that make a good systems architect — careful listening, understanding how components interact, preparing for failure modes — translate remarkably well to the theater.
How I got here
Systems Administration & Web Application Development
Started in the machine room as a senior systems administrator — running servers, managing infrastructure, learning what it means to operate systems that other people depend on daily. Eventually moved into management, leading the systems and web application development function. Built the foundational habits of mind: careful change management, understanding failure modes, and the discipline of documentation.
UVACollab — Senior Engineer to Director
Joined UVA in 2016 as a senior systems engineer on UVACollab, the university's primary collaboration and learning platform. One of my first projects was to re-architect the platform's deployment and supporting infrastructure: a 12-node Docker Swarm running on bare metal across two Dell M1000e blade chassis in two physical data centers. That cluster carried UVACollab in production from 2016 until retirement and never once crashed under its own weight — the only downtime it ever absorbed came from adjacent systems and networks.
Beyond infrastructure, I also did substantial code work in the UVACollab/Sakai codebase itself. The biggest piece was a complete rewrite of UVACollab's search subsystem — moving off the deprecated ES-embedded pattern onto external Elasticsearch with a redesigned indexing pipeline and a custom Java ES plugin that pushes Sakai's authorization checks into the search aggregation layer. The code lives at github.com/dnhutchins/es-plugin and in the search module of github.com/dnhutchins/collab_work.
This is also where I first stood up Graylog and the TICK stack, because no enterprise log or metrics service existed at UVA yet and a platform of that scale needed real visibility. The pattern — bare-metal Swarm plus homegrown observability — became the operational model I'd later carry into the Identity portfolio in an adapted form. Took on increasing responsibility through the engineering manager and director roles, eventually helping guide UVACollab through its multi-year retirement and migration to modern services. Operating at genuine university scale taught me how technology leadership is inseparable from organizational communication and stakeholder trust.
Manager → Assistant Director, Identity Solutions
Moved into the identity portfolio as Manager, Identity Architecture & Solutions, leading the team building NetBadge modernization and identity governance frameworks. Carried the proven UVACollab pattern over to the IAM platform — this time running Docker Swarm on VMs from UVA's central VMware group rather than on bare metal, and again paired with Graylog and TICK for observability because enterprise services still weren't yet on offer. During the Manager years, UVA's central capabilities finally matured to the point where consolidating made sense; I led the effort and teams that migrated identity's observability workloads onto Splunk and LogicMonitor.
When the director role above mine opened up, a colleague and I held the position together for roughly a year and a half during the search — leaning on my prior experience as a Director on the UVACollab side and what I'd taken from MOR's leadership program to step up and lead through the gap. By the time the dust settled, the work I was actually doing had grown well past what "Manager" described, so I petitioned for and earned a title change to Assistant Director, Identity Solutions — the title catching up to the role I'd already grown into.
Current focus areas include PAM expansion, identity governance maturation, and building a team culture that takes operations seriously as engineering discipline. The role blends technical depth with organizational leadership — I still get into the systems, and I also spend significant time on strategy, partnerships, and developing the people I work with.
The philosophy that drew me here
This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.
— Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to William Roscoe, December 27, 1820
This is the philosophy that drew me to UVA, and the one I try to honor in the work. It's a remarkable commitment for an institution to make — to follow truth wherever it leads, and to trust that reason, given room, can correct error over time.
The work I do comes back to the same discipline. Identity governance is fundamentally about who has the standing to make a claim, and how we verify it. Systems engineering is about understanding what's actually happening in the machine, not what we'd like to believe. Even running a show is about staying honest to what the audience can actually hear, see, and feel — not what the design document said they would. Stay close to the truth. Don't tolerate error out of comfort. Give reason the air it needs to do its work.
Things I believe
Technology serves people
The best systems are the ones you don't have to think about. Every hour of careful engineering I invest is an hour that a researcher, student, or staff member doesn't spend fighting infrastructure. That's the whole point.
Operations is engineering
The decision to treat production operations as a first-class engineering discipline — investing in observability, runbooks, and on-call health — is one of the highest-leverage things a technical organization can do. I've seen both sides.
Stewardship over ownership
I don't "own" the systems I work on — I steward them on behalf of the people who depend on them. That framing changes how you make decisions, especially hard ones about trade-offs between short-term convenience and long-term health.
Curiosity compounds
The ham radio license, the local AI experiments, the home lab — these aren't distractions from the work. Curiosity is the engine of good engineering. People who stay curious stay sharp, and staying sharp serves the work.
How I'm wired
Gallup's CliftonStrengths assessment sorts you into 34 themes ranked by what comes most naturally. Mine has an unusual concentration: six of my top six themes are all in the Strategic Thinking domain, with Relationship Building filling most of #7–#10, one Executing theme at #9, and no Influencing themes in the top tier at all. The pattern fits: I'm a thinker first, a builder of close relationships second, a doer third, and I'm not someone whose instinct is to take a room by force of personality. The work tends to speak for itself.
The top five
Strategic
Pattern recognition under uncertainty. Multiple paths to a goal, and then a deliberate choice of the best one. The discipline I have to maintain is narrating the reasoning out loud — otherwise it can look like winging it.
Input
A bias toward collecting. Books, papers, repos, mental files, archives of how things were built and why. It pays off later, when something I picked up years ago turns out to be the missing piece.
Futuristic
Most easily pulled toward what could be next. The platform that hasn't been built. The standard that hasn't been written. The legacy hardware that wants to be useful again with the right interface in front of it.
Intellection
Long quiet thinking is when my best work happens. Walks, mornings, an empty desk. People who know me know not to confuse the silence for disengagement — it's usually the deep loop running.
Learner
What I find satisfying isn't being good at something — it's the climbing. The steep part of any learning curve is where I'm happiest. The plateau is where I get restless.
Themes 6 – 10
Ideation
Connections between things that don't look connected. Theater and systems. Identity and emergence. The answer is often in the place you weren't supposed to look.
Connectedness
A persistent sense that everything is part of something larger. Cell rules and life. Standards and trust. It's why I keep returning to the systems that affect how real people get through their day.
Relator
A small number of deep relationships rather than many shallow ones. Trust gets earned over time, and once it is, it's durable. New people sometimes find me harder to get to know — I'm aware of it.
Achiever
Real energy from finishing things. Stamina shows up at hour ten of a long day, when other people's tanks are empty. It's an underrated leadership trait — most of running production work is just continuing to show up.
Developer
Spotting potential in people early and investing in their growth. Easily one of the most rewarding parts of leadership — it's part of why I take mentoring seriously, in the team and in theater alike.
Top 10 of 34 themes from the Gallup CliftonStrengths® assessment, taken November 2023. Theme names are trademarks of Gallup, Inc. The reflections above are mine, not Gallup's copy.