Hi, I'm Heath Dinkins — writer, distributed systems cloud architect, gamer, husband, and dad. I write by night and code by day.
I write middle-grade fantasy. My current novel, Dr. Frog and the Sky Panda, follows a boy who remembers everything into Coddiwomple, a floating sky academy where magic costs you your memories. It's the first in a planned series. I've spent years and more than two million words building Coddiwomple — four finished picture books (Knight Light, Coal Keeper, Sand Witch, and Sky Panda), 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.
By day I build large-scale healthcare systems for Leidos, most recently for the CDC. My work has included patient-monitoring software for surgical outcomes, the pipeline that shared Covid-19 data with the CDC and the states, disaster-response tracking for HHS and FEMA, and the infrastructure behind the National Healthcare Safety Network. 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.
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.
