An Introduction

Letter to all..

I'm David Hutchins. Assistant Director of Identity Solutions at the University of Virginia, a systems architect and technology leader with thirty-plus years in IT and most of two decades in higher education.

My day job is running UVA's identity, authentication, and access management. In plainer terms: when a student, faculty member, or staff member logs in anywhere on Grounds, something my team owns said "yes, that's them, and here's what they can do." When it works, nobody notices. When it doesn't, everybody does. Before Identity, I ran the technical side of UVACollab, UVA's longtime collaboration and learning platform. I re-architected its infrastructure onto a bare-metal Docker Swarm across two data centers that ran for years without a self-induced outage; rewrote its search subsystem, including a custom Elasticsearch plugin that pushed Sakai's authorization checks into the search aggregation layer; and, when the platform transitioned to Canvas, hired my own successor and put the operational parking brakes on so the multi-year migration could continue in steady hands. Before UVA, I spent fourteen years at Norfolk State University, coming up through sysadmin work into management and eventually the interim directorship of enterprise application services.

Outside the day job: I'm one of the originators of ARMS & SARM , a draft interoperability spec and open-source reference implementation for the IAM governance gap SCIM didn't reach (presented at InCommon BaseCamp 2026; gathering cross-institutional collaborators since). I do sound design and engineering, occasionally lighting, with Four County Players in Barboursville, Virginia; recent credits include Sweeney Todd, The Game's Afoot, The SpongeBob Musical, and The Prom. I mentor younger technicians in sound work through Four County's youth productions and UVA's Teen Arts Program. I hold an amateur radio license KK4LHO . And I tinker in a home lab where cellular automata, local LLMs, and reverse-engineered lighting consoles coexist peacefully.

The through-line, if there is one, is fairly consistent: technology in service of people, not the other way around. The systems I've cared most about; identity, learning platforms, theatrical sound, the standards work, are all ones where people depend on something running reliably in the background so they can focus on what actually matters to them. Reliability as a service to people. Trust as infrastructure. Handoff as its own kind of leadership.

If any of this resonates, a project you'd like a thinking-partner on, a role that needs the combination I offer, an identity or standards effort that could use another voice, or just a note to say hello, I'd genuinely like to hear from you.