Middle-grade fantasy by night.Healthcare systems by day.

I'm Heath Dinkins — writer, distributed systems cloud architect, gamer, husband, and dad. I don't have bad days, only good ones and great ones, and I rarely meet a stranger.

Heath Dinkins, smiling, arms crossed, in a dark suit

Dr. Frog and the Sky Panda

My current novel follows a Holmes-brained kid named Frog and a crew of children plucked out of history into Coddiwomple, a floating sky academy where magic costs you your memories. It's the first in a planned series, it's built like a heist, and it's currently out with literary agents.

I've spent years and more than two million words building Coddiwomple — four finished picture books, a completed first novel, and a shelf of drafts waiting their turn. My writing has won contests and awards from my school days through my professional career.

Knight Light
Sky Panda
Sand Witch
Coal Keeper

Four picture books, one world.

By day

I build large-scale healthcare systems for Leidos, most recently for the CDC. I wanted to be a doctor once; I ended up helping patients with code instead, and I've made peace with that trade. These days I spend as much time leading and teaching engineers as I do writing software, and it turns out I love that part most.

  1. Distributed Systems Cloud Architect, Leidos

    July 2021 – present · CDC National Healthcare Safety Network and IZ Gateway

    • Led the migration of NHSN from on-premises infrastructure to Azure — Kubernetes (AKS), Azure SQL, Key Vault, and Service Bus.
    • Own DevSecOps for the program: CI/CD pipelines, security scanning, and environment management across Azure DevOps and GitHub.
    • Design and build Java APIs that let hospitals, long-term care facilities, and other providers exchange data securely with CDC and HHS.
    • Deployed the IZ Gateway, which routes immunization records to state health departments, as Java microservices on AWS.

  2. Tech Lead and Cloud Architect, ASPR Ready — Leidos

    February 2021 – July 2021 · HHS ASPR

    • Led the team that designed and shipped ASPR Ready, which tracks the people and supplies supporting hurricane and tornado sites for HHS and FEMA — Java microservices and React on AWS GovCloud.

  3. Tech Lead and Cloud Architect, CareC2 — Leidos

    June 2017 – February 2021

    • Built a highly distributed ETL system on AWS that monitors surgery data from multiple healthcare providers to improve patient outcomes.
    • Managed multiple software teams as lead Java developer, tech lead, and cloud architect.
    • Built the ETL pipeline that shared Covid-19 data between the CDC and the states.

  4. Senior Software Engineer, Leidos

    August 2015 – June 2017

    • Developed the Leidos Data Exchange Framework for interoperability between disparate health systems — Kubernetes, Kafka, Docker, Spring Boot, and Camel on AWS.

  5. Software Engineer, Leidos

    March 2015 – August 2015

    • Built enterprise healthcare information exchange applications in Java and Groovy (Grails, Spring, Hibernate) with PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Cassandra.

  6. Systems Developer, Courier Express

    January 2012 – March 2015 · Marietta, GA

    • Wrote EDI parsers for ANSI X12 shipping documents and common file formats on a LAMP stack with PHP, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

About

I'm a first-generation college graduate, with a bachelor's from Kennesaw State. I wrote my first line of code in 2009 and never looked back — not because I loved coding at first, but because I found out software is really about design, collaboration, and experimentation.

When I'm not writing or building, I'm probably deep in a JRPG, an action movie like Rocky, or a conversation with someone I met ten minutes ago. I live outside Atlanta with my family.

Get in touch

Agents, editors, and fellow builders welcome. The fastest way to reach me is email.

hrdinkins@gmail.com LinkedIn