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

I'm Heath Dinkins — writer, distributed systems cloud architect, gamer, husband, and dad. I write by night and code by day.

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

By night

Dr. Frog and the Sky Panda

Frog remembers everything, and it has never once been useful. Then red snow falls on his Georgia town, history starts rewriting itself, and his mom gets sick. To find answers, he must travel to a school at the end of time that opens on the first of September — and to get there, Frog will have to grab a rope hanging from the sky.

Book 1 of the Coddiwomple Series. 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.

See all the books
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. NHSN, the system my work sits under, now serves more than 178,000 users across over 39,000 healthcare facilities nationwide. 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. Principal DevOps and Automation Cloud Architect, Leidos

    September 2026 – present · CDC National Healthcare Safety Network

    • Building the automated test and quality platform covering more than 200 deployed services — Java 21 Quarkus microservices — with smoke, boundary, and full integration tests run against stand-ins for the outside services.
    • Set a coverage gate on core logic — 60% line and branch, built from Maven Central alone — across the covid19api and CDA services.
    • Validate CDA sample documents against schema and schematron, so fixtures can't quietly drift out of spec.
    • Wired static analysis (SpotBugs, PMD), committed-credential scanning, and dependency vulnerability checks into GitHub Actions pipelines.

  2. Principal DevOps Cloud Architect, Leidos

    March 2024 – September 2026 · CDC National Healthcare Safety Network

    • Led the migration of NHSN from on-premises infrastructure to Azure — Kubernetes (AKS), Azure SQL, Key Vault, and Service Bus.
    • Own the delivery platform behind the program: 180 CI/CD pipelines across Azure DevOps and GitHub spanning four environments, feeding more than 200 deployed services and over 50 Databricks notebooks.
    • Own DevSecOps across all of it — security scanning, secrets management, and environment promotion.

  3. Distributed Systems Cloud Architect, Leidos

    July 2021 – March 2024 · CDC National Healthcare Safety Network and IZ Gateway

    • Designed and built Java APIs that let hospitals, long-term care facilities, and other providers exchange data securely with CDC and HHS.
    • Built the ingestion side of NHSN's automated FHIR reporting, processing patient-level FHIR at terabyte scale to feed digital quality measures.
    • Deployed the IZ Gateway, which routes immunization records to state health departments, as Java microservices on AWS.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

Coding  ·  Resume

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.

Full bio

Get in touch

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

hrdinkins@gmail.com LinkedIn