If I have one major career regret, it is leaving ESPN.
I got the job straight out of college. ESPN is Disney — the same company, the same badge — and those were the first two and a half of my eleven years. I took it for granted. I assumed that was simply what working in technology was like: leadership that was great at leading, roadmaps that existed, plans that were followed, structure that held. I thought that was the floor. It took the next eight and a half years to learn it had been the ceiling.
This series has been seven parts of bills, and I want to close it with what went right — not as a consolation paragraph, but as the final piece of the argument. The same company that produced everything in Parts 1 through 7 also contained the proof that none of it was necessary. ESPN had the leadership. ESPN had the roadmaps and the plans and the structure. ESPN does technology so well that it built its own homegrown frontend framework, and people enjoy using it — which anyone in software will tell you is the harder achievement. Disney Experiences is the same company. The absurdities in Part 2 and Part 3 were never a question of ability. They already have the playbook. They just refuse to look at it.
What ESPN Gave Me
Before ESPN, I had never worked on a large distributed system. At ESPN I learned scaling, caching, service-level agreements — not from a textbook, but on systems that had to hold when the whole country checked a score at once. I was a kid out of college being handed real problems inside a structure that made it safe to grow. I learned so much there that I spent the rest of my career spending it.
The projects were the best of my eleven years. I led the frontend rewrite of the Olympics pages. I worked on the NFL Draftcast rewrite and the MLB Gamecast modernizations. If you have ever followed a draft pick or a ninth inning from your desk, we were on opposite sides of the same page. My pages were seen by millions. That is a lifetime of pride, and I will never forget it.
The Import Business
Then I moved to Disney Parks & Resorts, which later became Disney Experiences, and the remaining eight and a half years were spent trying to get our processes back to the state we had at ESPN. That sentence is not an exaggeration; it is a job description. The designs and architectures I implemented at Parks were largely lifted from, or inspired by, solutions I had seen at ESPN. I spent eight years importing a working culture from one wing of the company to another, one architecture diagram at a time.
The import was necessary because nothing was waiting on the other side. It was possible because the source existed — inside the same company, a badge swipe away.
The Good Parts of Parks
Parks had good parts too, and this is the essay where they belong.
DClean is one of my favorite projects anywhere. We used IoT to improve the experience of the custodial cast members — the people who keep the parks clean. Technology pointed at making a hard job easier for the people doing it: that is the version of the company the posters advertise, and for one project I got to build it.
During the pandemic we rewrote the mobile client, and I learned Flutter doing it. And the platform of record itself — the operations-data system from Part 6 — was genuinely fun engineering, if you take away the toxicity of the team. That sentence is the whole series in miniature. The work was good. The environment around the work was the problem. I have spent seven essays on the environment; the work deserved this one.
Back Through the Gates
Now I am a civilian in the Disney world again. It is not as much fun once you have seen how the sausage gets made. I am trying to forget and move on — to experience Disney as a guest and not as a cast member. We seem to be better off that way.
When I stand in a park now and want to know how long a line is, I check my phone like everyone else. The number comes back from the system I spent years defending. It still answers. I am just on the other side of it now.
