Behind the Code: Tom's Story

For forty years I’ve built platforms, not applications. Every time I’ve been asked to ship a product, the product has turned out to be a system for generating products: a metaprogramming layer, a runtime, a configuration-driven engine that outlives the feature request it started from.

At AT&T I architected Forms Express, a four-layer dynamic runtime that let non-programmers create schema-agnostic insurance applications. At Auto Parts International I built a state-machine platform that drove an entire distribution system off data-queue records. At VeriSign, my team shipped the first-ever customer self-service mobile device activation system, winning the 2003 SUPERQuest Award. Along the way I was a C++ MVP, authored or co-authored nine technology books, wrote 100+ articles for .NET Programming Tips & Techniques, and helped run CodeGuru (the largest Windows developer community of its era).

At Microsoft, I architected and built TAG (Templatized Article Generator), a production LLM orchestration platform that drives Azure Terraform documentation. TAG introduces a template layer where HTML-like tags encode prompt structures that get concatenated with code samples at runtime and routed to generative models, with results injected back into the output. Nearly 100 articles have shipped through the system.

This blog is where I work through the mathematics and engineering underneath the models: from gradient descent to inference-time behavior, from tokenization to training infrastructure.

Connect with me on LinkedIn .