Kenneth J. Carpenter

Abstractions and modeling have always interested me, especially since taking graduate-level object-oriented design and data structures courses in Java, UML, and the seminal design-by-contract OO language Eiffel. I resonated strongly with the ideas and design patterns and they increasingly influenced the modeling work I was doing in my actuarial career, culminating in full-blown object-oriented systems for large-group pricing and reserving. Although I was working on the business side (in actuarial departments), I managed teams of both domestic and global developers and often sketched my ideas as models and used them in communications with them.

When I subsequently came to Toronto as a very early joiner to a startup for the first time, everyone had the opportunity to fill gaps with whatever skills they brought to the table. Although I had originally been hired to work on education and outreach, architecture quickly became my main function. At first I modeled existing code for IP and documentation purposes, then taught modeling to senior developers, and then finally helped move the company to design-first for most projects.

Because I was working at a company/product-portfolio level I was given the title Enterprise Architect, although I thought of myself as an “Entre-prise Architect”, prioritizing anything that supported the company’s entrepreneurship. In practice that has meant capturing and communicating the company’s products and innovations, and mentoring others to do so too. But I was also always looking to position the company for an EA capability.

One helpful step in that direction was the choice of ArchiMate as a visual modeling language for DLT Labs. I explain that choice a bit in a 2019 blog post. ArchiMate’s core layers, with their parallels to TOGAF’s Architecture Development Method, provide a helpful jumping off point to discuss EA with colleagues. At the time of writing, I have been working to encourage more formal architecture governance, practice, and capability at the enterprise and — especially — product portfolio level. TOGAF is an inspiration, and the company’s size, growth, and agility are key considerations.

(This snippet of my ArchiMate modeling shown is from another 2019 blog post published by the company.)

Another area in which I found an opportunity to contribute was in APIs and interface-implementation separation more generally — once again taking cues from my design-by-contract “upbringing”. Our developers had been doing code-annotation-based APIDocs and testing with Postman. I began learning about Swagger in 2018 and evangelizing it a bit at the office. But in 2019 when our CTO expressed a desire to move to microservices, I encouraged colleagues to begin drafting OpenAPI 3 versions of what would be the APIs of those new services, and became the coach and final reviewer for those specifications. We have since adopted Stoplight for linting and publishing these APIs internally and to clients, and 42Crunch for API security analysis.

Little of this would have been possible without my life-long interest in programming, with professional experiences going back to my early teens. Although I mostly only read code these days, I do still enjoy learning about programming and computer science topics. In addition to the topics I learn for work, I am interested in functional programming and domain specific languages. I also think formal program correctness is really interesting, especially in the context of distributed ledgers.

Being a software product company, DLT Labs became my first career opportunity to work explicitly on intellectual property. Two of the company’s C-suite executives are noted Canadian IP attorneys and I had the great fortune of having them review and use my work.

Two successful patents for company-created IP, US11095431B2 Blockchain Transaction Manager, and US10726002B1 Relational Data Management and Organization Using DLT, showcase my research, writing, and modeling abilities. I’m not the inventor, but all of the models and most of the descriptions of the IP are my own authorship. Content was derived both from interviewing developers and directly reviewing source code (mostly JavaScript).

Years of hobby-reading Slashdot and learning about open source licensing issues also paid off as I found the technology side of the company needed someone who understood the risks and obligations relating to the incorporation of open source into our products. I set license use guidelines and instituted source-code license scans and performed all of the analysis through the first few years of the company’s existence.

Although my current career path is in IT, I built most of my technology and leadership skills using technology directly to solve business problems while working in  the actuarial departments of Fortune 50 life and health insurance companies. I have some actuarial exams passed, and rose to the level of Actuarial Director before taking a (very) early retirement deal to explore the front lines of technology.

Amusingly, it may have been my destiny to focus on the programming side all along — the first class I ever took at a college featured actuaries’ favorite language of the time, APL. That was prophetic at age 14, long before I had ever heard of actuarial science.

Later, joining Aetna directly out of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, I worked in a range of life, disability, and health pricing and valuation roles, including:

• Small group sponsored, and small and large group GUL pricing
• Disability provision pricing
• Valuation and solvency work with international life and health insurance JVs in East and Southeast Asia
• Large group health pricing system development
• Corporate-level health and disability reserving and reserving system development.

I mentioned in the overview that one accomplishment was replacing Aetna’s monthly corporate IBNR system, which I called “IBNR Components” to emphasize separation-of-concerns and configurability in its design. Years later I am still hearing from former colleagues about how the system is still “going so strong” and “made Valuation a better place”.

This C#.NET system was my most significant achievement at the company, and that included overcoming a number of issues that made the effort harder:

• The existing system was a decades-long agglomeration of Excel, VBA, and VB6 parts created and maintained by actuarial students, usually without a programming background.
• At its core was an Excel/VBA model that was considered untouchable canon, but could not be fully explained, even through reverse engineering.
• While working on IBNR Components, my small team also maintained the existing system and supported the monthly reserving closes, helping our colleagues achieve an unbroken string of 60+ months of meeting our timeframes (that is, my entire tenure in the area).
• And we were severely handcuffed in terms of technology due to being in a business area. At the time, despite years of asking, we were stuck using desktop databases and version control (Access and TFS).

The upside of the latter technology limitations was that they inspired my current move to the pure technology realm, where I gained exposure to many topics, including enterprise blockchain, cloud computing, microservice architecture, JavaScript frameworks, identity frameworks, NoSQL databases, and more.

By the way, the IBNR solution has quite a bit of relevance to data science. It included substantial data ingestion and scrubbing, feeding to models, harvesting results, and reporting.  Actually, many of the actuarial modeling activities earlier in my career did, as well. My undergrad degree was in math with a fair amount of focus on multivariate statistics, and I did some additional studying of time series and regression during my actuarial student days. There was also some formal training and work in SAS, although I’m admittedly not anxious to re-experience that platform’s idiosyncrasies.

In 1999, when I stepped off a plane in Jakarta for my first assignment with Aetna International, I went from being quite untraveled to being someone for whom global, cross-cultural teamwork would be a key focus for the rest of my career, and something I greatly enjoy.

My international experiences have included:

• Actuarial analysis work in-country with local actuaries and staff in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Taiwan.
• Helping to onboard a new international technical center engagement for Aetna in India, including traveling to personally deliver culture and ethics training to initial staff.
• In-country delivery of IT and actuarial training to international staff.
• Hosting international staff in the U.S. for training, project initiation, and intensive project pushes.

In addition, for over a decade I’ve had the rewarding experience of managing or mentoring staff in India, and have learned far more from doing so than I could ever teach.

My dad was a terrific father and a dedicated educator who taught well into his 70s. He was a primary school teacher when I was young, and later a college professor. That is probably why helping others learn and succeed has always been a high priority for me. I’ve supervised staff since very early on in my career, and I take great pride when I hear that they grew professionally during our time together. You can see a few examples in my LinkedIn Recommendations.

Evidence of my commitment to mentoring is that a member of one my international teams co-founded DLT Labs and invited me to join the company. He cited my mentorship as a key reason, which I consider a great honor.