Calgary, Alberta

Evan Nadeau

Modernization at scale is rarely a technology problem.

It is usually a people, process, and decision-making problem. Nearly 30 years into a career in enterprise infrastructure and cloud, that is still the part I find interesting, and it is the part AI does not solve for you.

LinkedIn Email

The thread

Curiosity, then everything else

Growing up, I was the kid who took things apart to see how they worked. My mom used to joke that she had to tie me to a tree, because I would wander off toward whatever machinery was running just to watch it do its thing. That curiosity turned into a career in 1997 and it has not let up since.

The technologies changed. The titles changed. The common thread did not. What holds my interest is not the technology itself, it is understanding how things actually work, solving the problem underneath the problem, and helping people find a better way forward.

I have seen technology from every chair: engineer, architect, manager, consultant, customer, and vendor partner. That makes it easier to bridge the conversation between the engineers who see one piece, the vendor who sees another, and the leadership team who sees a third. Conductor, not hero.

Method

How I actually solve things

• My first move is questions.

  What is really happening, what have we already tried, and what are we assuming that nobody has checked. I get handed situations that are stuck, messy, or quietly on fire, and most of them are stuck because the wrong question is being answered very well.

• I look for the constraint, not the symptom.

  A cloud bill that climbs every month is not a budget problem. One I inherited had become accepted as the cost of doing business, and it turned out to be a caching and network design decision that had been sitting in plain sight for months. The bill was the symptom. Nobody had gone looking for the cause.

• I challenge how we have always done it.

  Why does everyone get access to the whole network when most people need a handful of specific things? That question, not the technology that answered it, was the actual work. Band-aid fixes bother me. I want the version that still works in two years.

• I would rather be useful than right.

  My job is to lay out the real options with their trade-offs, make a recommendation, and then support the decision that gets made, including when it is not the one I would have picked. Informed decisions are the deliverable. Being right is not.

• I own it when I break something.

  Early in my career I deleted DNS records and took a chunk of the business down with them. I put my hand up immediately and I have never approached change or dependency planning the same way since. I learn from my first mistake, not my third one.

Strengths

What that looks like from the outside

CliftonStrengths put words to something I had been doing without naming it. These five are mine, in the order they come out:

Responsibility

If I said I would do it, it is done. That includes owning it out loud when it goes wrong.

Ideation

I usually turn up with an option nobody had put on the table, because I have worked in enough places to have seen it solved a different way.

Relator

I would rather have a handful of people who trust me than a wide network who know my name.

Maximizer

Good enough for now is where I start arguing. The last ten percent, the documentation, the operational readiness, the handover, is what decides whether any of it lasts.

Futuristic

I am more interested in where this is going than where it has been. Which brings me to the current chapter.

Next

Where I am pointing the curiosity now

The same instinct that pulled me toward running machinery as a kid now points at AI. Not as a topic to have opinions about, but as something to use until I understand where it genuinely changes the work and where it quietly does not.

So I use AI-assisted engineering every day rather than talking about it. I built a system that runs my team's work management, documentation, and weekly reporting, so that overhead stopped competing with the engineering. On my own time I build multi-agent systems, because reading about a technology has never once taught me what using it teaches me.

What I want next is the work where AI meaningfully changes what a small team can do, with somebody in the room who can tell the difference between what should be automated and what should be left alone. Thirty years of watching technology arrive has made me neither a sceptic nor a believer. It has made me useful at telling the two apart.

Contact

Let's talk

The best days at work are still the days when I help make someone else's day better. If you have something complex that needs untangling, I would like to hear about it.

The full record, the roles, the dates, and the things I have shipped, lives on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn evan_nadeau@outlook.com