01
Jacked
2026 — NowFounder & sole developer
iOS AI gym coach. Designed, built, and shipped to the App Store in 60 days, solo. Claude Haiku on AWS Bedrock; progressive-overload coaching grounded in real performance data.
jackedapp.ai →Phil Strong · Engineering Leader
If software ate the world,
AI is eating software.
20 years building developer tools and AI platforms — Sencha, IronNet, AWS. I take over orgs that have stopped shipping and make them ship. After two decades scaling other people's bets, I'm making my own.
About
My career has been a pattern. Take a team that isn't shipping, and six months later it ships. CodeDeploy with no agent releases in 18 months. CodeCatalyst with five teams that couldn't collapse into a product. AWS Transform with sixty engineers across two halves that didn't talk to each other. Twice at AWS that pattern ended in a Tier-1 re:Invent launch in under three months.
I'm honest about something most managers won't say out loud: becoming a manager resets your mastery clock to zero. You go from a top performer to mediocre in a single bound. The only way back is to stay in the work. Twenty years in, I still write specs when PMs leave. I build prototypes. I sit in the customer Slack channel. I run my own demos. Engineers can tell when their manager has touched the code — and so can customers.
The next chapter is my own. Jacked — an iOS AI gym coach I shipped solo to the App Store in 60 days — is the proof point: one experienced engineer plus Claude can outbuild a team from a few years ago. I'm turning the tools that made Jacked possible into something other small teams can use to ship the same way. More soon.
Selected work
Four chapters. Each one taught me something I couldn't have learned by reading.
02
Amazon Web Services
2020 — NowSenior Software Development Manager
Launched AWS Transform Custom (Tier-1 re:Invent 2025). Built the human–AI agent experience behind AWS Transform — 700,000+ developer hours saved year one. Drove CodeDeploy architecture for billions of deployments at 99.998% availability.
03
IronNet Cybersecurity
2014 — 2020Senior Director of Product Engineering
Founding engineer on IronDefense. Scaled engineering from 5 to 100+ through IPO. Led SaaS migration across AWS, Azure, and on-prem. Reliability 95% → 99.5%. FedRAMP ATO.
04
Sencha
2011 — 2014Engineering Director / Sr. Software Architect
Led commercial developer tools — Architect, ExtJS IDE plugins, Themer, Animator — used by 60% of the Fortune 100. Architected Sencha Architect, a cross-platform Electron app builder, pre-React era.
Writing
Notes on AI-assisted development, leadership, and shipping software.
Read the writing →