I’m Jim Cowart — principal architect at Apogee Travel, where I lead architecture for a fintech company whose first product lives in the travel space. My day-to-day is a mix of designing systems, building features (coding architect here — ivory towers aren’t my thing), and pioneering how we use AI.
NAME Jim Cowart ROLE Principal Architect @ Apogee Travel LOCATION Chattanooga, TN ONLINE @ifandelse
The Long Way Around
My professional life started in music. Being an early adopter in digital recording meant learning hardware inside and out — how operating systems managed resources, why that particular SCSI chain kept dropping audio, all the fun stuff. After coming off the road, I took a job in hardware repair and realized I didn’t just want to build amazing machines for other people to use — I wanted to build things to run on those machines.
In a strange twist of fate, Allaire (there’s a name from the tape backup archives!) sent me an eval copy of ColdFusion to review, and that was it. I was hooked. (There was some QBasic hiding in my middle school past, so maybe the signs were always there.) From ColdFusion I moved to .NET web and desktop development, worked as a database dev, became a data warehousing architect, spent time in Erlang, and eventually landed in full-stack web with Node.js and nearly every frontend framework under the sun. My love for building things - products and teams - is what’s kept me in the saddle.
QBasic → ColdFusion → .NET → Database Dev → Data Warehousing → Erlang → Node.js → Every Frontend Framework™ → AI + Architecture
What I Write About
AI — specifically the importance of human agency, not surrendering your mental model of systems, and using AI tools to amplify experience and intent rather than replace thought. Code and problem solving. Leadership. Open source. The cultural implications of AI in the workplace. Being brutally honest about not knowing everything.
I’m also an aspiring fiction author on the side, and more of what I’ve learned from that craft has influenced my approach to software than you might expect — especially when it comes to working with AI.
The Personal Bits
I live in Chattanooga, TN with my wife, three sons, a gentle-but-stubborn-and-scared-of-everything dog, and an old toothless cat who still amazes with his professional hunter skills.
I hate coffee. Tea is all that matters. Oh, and I once dropped a production database table containing every sales pipeline lead for our company. Nothing wakes you up quite like that. Thank God for database backups.