I’ve been building things on the web since 1998, back when “full stack” meant you also ran the servers under your desk. I’m Devon Hillard: enterprise architect, open-source maintainer, and consulting CTO based in Colorado.
The Long Version
My first real job was at ATG (Art Technology Group) , where I learned enterprise Java by building eCommerce platforms before most people had bought anything online. That turned into two decades of building and architecting large-scale commerce systems: projects for AT&T, Procter & Gamble, Ulta, and others where “downtime” was measured in revenue-per-second.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, I co-founded a hosting company with two friends. We started in a coffee shop, grew to serving Fortune 1000 clients, and learned everything about running infrastructure the hard way. These days I’m a Principal Architect at McFadyen Digital , where I lead AI strategy, helping enterprise clients figure out which parts of the AI hype actually apply to their business. I also run Black Magic Consulting for hands-on advisory and implementation work.
10MinuteMail
In 2006, I built 10MinuteMail as a weekend project: a disposable email service that gives you a temporary inbox for ten minutes. Nearly twenty years later, it’s still running, still serving over 100,000 visitors a day, and still funded entirely by ad revenue and stubbornness. It’s been my longest-running lesson in what happens when you put something on the internet and just… don’t take it down.
What I’m Working On
Right now I’m deep in the intersection of AI and real engineering problems. Not the “slap an LLM on it” kind, but the kind where you figure out where agents, automation, and language models actually reduce friction for humans. I maintain several open-source projects , including Spring User Framework for Spring Boot apps, and tools in the Cloudflare and AI ecosystems.
Off the Clock
When I’m not writing code, I’m probably building a keyboard, playing something on my Xbox, or out in the Colorado countryside with my family and our critters. I’ve been a gamer since before it was socially acceptable and fallen far too deeply into the mechanical keyboard rabbit hole.
This Site
Digital Sanctuary has been my corner of the internet since the early 2000s. It started as a personal blog: life updates, tech opinions, whatever was on my mind. Over the years it’s shifted more toward professional writing, but the spirit is the same: a place to think out loud about the things I’m building, learning, and occasionally getting wrong. It runs on EmDash , a CMS built on Astro.