Dave Nocera

Dave Nocera grew up poor in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the son of parents who didn't have much but made sure he knew the world was worth figuring out.

He and his brothers, Andy and Pat, picked through the neighborhood garbage for things to take apart and sell—motors, radios, anything mechanical. It taught them early what most people never learn: that everything appearing simple is hiding tremendous complexity underneath. The three brothers won first, second, and third place in every science fair they entered. That lesson became the engine of everything that followed.

After high school, Dave worked more than forty jobs — whatever it took — saving enough to put himself through college. He graduated summa cum laude from Kean University and spent the next three decades doing things that didn't yet have job titles.

At AT&T, he was known among his peers as a Unix guru—pioneering early Unix systems and building interfaces between the PC and Unix worlds at a time when few people understood either. His signature skill was reading crash dumps, often without access to source code, solving system failures by disassembling failed code down to bare metal. Over seventeen years he rose to become Chief Infrastructure Architect for AT&T Consumer—architecting, testing, and debugging the infrastructure technology stack for 14,000 call center agents. An early innovator in virtual reality before most people had heard the term, he was also among the first at AT&T to pioneer artificial intelligence, programming expert systems in LISP and Prolog at a time when the field was still being invented.

He founded Verifichi LLC and spent seven years building ITVerify — a data warehouse in a box, protected by five U.S. patents — which he licensed to Fortune 500 companies for millions of dollars. When he demoed ITVerify to the Gartner Group, they told him they didn't yet have a name for the space he had created. They named it CMDB—the Configuration Management Database—which became the very foundation of ITIL, the global standard for IT service management. Companies, including IBM, eventually followed with their own versions. He had built it first.

He then spent ten years at Bank of America as the senior debugger; other senior debuggers called when they were out of ideas, resolving hundreds of the most complex system failures in the organization's history. During those same ten years, he mentored two FIRST Robotics teams, including the only special needs team in the program, earning two Presidential Volunteer Service Awards from President Obama. He secured major funding for the special needs team over multiple years, work that earned him Bank of America's Diamond Award—the highest level of employee recognition the company bestows. His core insight, earned the hard way: catastrophic failures come from systems doing exactly what they were designed to do in unanticipated contexts.

He is a second-generation beekeeper who also raised chickens. He taught himself guitar, logging ten thousand hours specifically to test whether Malcolm Gladwell's theory held up. He is self-taught in quantum mechanics and draws on fifty years of meditation practice.

One afternoon, watching a bee emerge from its cell, he observed nursery bees teaching the newborn her identity through chemical signals—consciousness emerging from pure instinct and social learning. He retired at sixty-two to write fiction, bringing the same obsessive discipline to storytelling that he had applied to everything else.

He is the author of The Supercolony Wars: An Insect Epic and the forthcoming Timeline 27.