A technology innovation studio and product incubator. We build our own software, engineer platforms, contribute to open source, teach, and take on client work that deserves the same standard.
The name
Fourth Quest takes its name from the Vedic Sanskrit word Tureeya, meaning “the fourth”. It refers to the ultimate state of consciousness for a spiritual seeker.
The parallel in the material world is simple enough. Once the three basic needs of food, clothing and shelter are met, what begins is the quest for knowledge, learning and innovation. The fourth quest. That is the work we wanted to do, so that became the name.
In practice it means we'd rather build the thing than write the deck about the thing, and we'd rather publish the source than describe it.
Founder
Founder and technical leader. Two decades delivering software, in senior engineering and architecture roles at some of the largest institutions in finance, healthcare and industry.
That has meant senior leadership at Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, IoT work at GE Lighting on LightGrid, and engineering roles at Cardinal Health and ADP.
Alongside the day job, an open source contributor, including to Spring Cloud Config, and a speaker at Platform Engineering Conf, CodeMash, SpringOne and the Cleveland Java User Group.
Mentoring and training have run in parallel the whole way through. Teaching math and science to kids at a STEM school run by GE. Teaching Java at Tech Elevator, the well respected Cleveland-based coding bootcamp, to people making the switch into IT careers. Leading corporate learning initiatives, writing the curricula for immersion programs, and running technical webinars with industry experts.
At Fourth Quest all of it converges: building products and platforms, contributing upstream, and creating the learning environment around them.
Fourth Quest is deliberately small. The person who scopes your work is the person who does it.
What we do
Fourth Quest gets mistaken for a consultancy because consulting is the part clients buy first. Here is the rest of it.
Our own software, incubated end to end. Four of them in development right now.
ProductsDeveloper platforms and cloud-native foundations that teams actually want to use.
Platform workLibraries and starters under Apache-2.0, with one already GA on Maven Central.
Open sourceCourses, corporate programs, workshops, and conference talks with runnable code.
TrainingArchitecture, platform, DevSecOps and AI engineering for teams that need it.
ServicesSpringOne, CodeMash and JUG sessions, every one with slides and source.
TalksMost of what we ship started as something we were not paid to look into. Quantum computing from a Java developer's seat, using the Strange API. AI running locally on edge hardware, with no keys and no data leaving the network. Cloud-native systems and microservice architecture, worked out properly rather than cargo-culted. We publish what we find either way, whether it turns into a product, a library or a conference talk.
Whether that is a product partnership, a platform, or a hard problem you have been circling for a while.
