A storage engine, not a server upgrade
Our weather-data platform was growing a terabyte a day. I wrote a custom MySQL table handler that brought daily growth down to 12GB and cut average processing time from 20 minutes to 20 seconds.
Nicholas M.T. Elliott · Engineering Leader
Teams and platforms that last.
I founded Skyward App Company in 2010 and ran it profitably for sixteen years. For fifteen of them, I led Syngenta's seed-recommendation platforms — from a regional sustainability tool to systems serving 10,000+ growers across three continents. I built the team, made the architecture calls, and still write code.
Track record
Selected work
Built Skyward App Company from one person into a 30-person firm, profitable for sixteen straight years.
- Role
- Founder, Managing Director, CTO
- Outcome
- Hired and mentored a 24-engineer team, built the delivery practices, and kept client relationships running for a decade or more.
- Scale
- $3.4M peak revenue (2023) · zero unprofitable years
Led Syngenta’s seed-recommendation platforms for fifteen years, from regional tool to global systems.
- Role
- Primary technical partner and architect
- Outcome
- E-Luminate (later GHX Fields) supports a few hundred advisors serving 10,000+ growers in the US and Canada; Cropwise reaches similar scale in markets including Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Ukraine, and Hungary.
- Scale
- 2011–2026 · three continents
Moved 20 production systems from Azure to AWS in six months without pausing feature delivery.
- Role
- Architect and migration lead
- Outcome
- Replaced click-ops with AWS CDK infrastructure-as-code, cut infrastructure burn 25%, made deployments 75% faster, and passed SOC 2 Type 2 in 2025.
- Scale
- 20 systems · 6 months
Shipped Root Cause, an AI feature analyzing 90,000 fields every week in production.
- Role
- Product and engineering lead
- Outcome
- Proactively surfaces agronomic and environmental concerns with suggested mitigations, reaching 90% of growers and saving each dozens of hours per season.
- Scale
- In production since 2026
How I work
Four things I keep doing
Built Teams
Grew Skyward from just me to 30 people — 24 engineers — across the US, India, Brazil, Egypt, and Europe, and kept the company profitable every year.
Modernized Platforms
Moved 20 production systems from Azure to AWS in six months. Infrastructure burn dropped 25% and deployments got 75% faster.
Shipped Production AI
Root Cause analyzes 90,000 grower fields a week and puts actionable findings in front of 90% of growers.
Stayed Technical
From a custom MySQL storage engine in the early 2000s to AWS CDK and LLM pipelines today, I have never stopped doing technical work alongside the leadership work.
Case study
Fifteen years with one client
Syngenta's E-Luminate, GHX Fields, and Cropwise platforms, 2011–2026.
Syngenta · E-Luminate / GHX Fields / Cropwise
From regional tool to global seed-recommendation platform
What started as a regional sustainability app became Syngenta's digital seed-recommendation system: a few hundred advisors using it to serve 10,000+ growers in the US and Canada, with Cropwise carrying similar scale into Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Ukraine, Hungary, and other markets. Along the way we rebuilt it from .NET Framework and Knockout on Azure into TypeScript/React and .NET Core/Node.js services on AWS.
20 systems moved from Azure to AWS in six months — 25% lower burn rate, 75% faster deployments.
Salesforce, SAP, and a shared sales-hierarchy abstraction spanning regional commercial models.
OpenTelemetry instrumentation end to end; the same telemetry carried us through SOC 2 Type 2 in 2025.
Career depth
Hard problems I've owned
Twenty-five years of shipping means a few stories. These are the ones I still get asked about.
GPS before smartphones
In the early 2000s I debugged serial carrier-signal issues between GPS units and Dell Axim handhelds for field data collection — no SDKs, no Stack Overflow, just protocol documentation and patience.
SOC 2 without the theater
Took Skyward through SOC 2 Type 2 in 2025 with minimal remediation by building controls on the observability and processes we already ran, instead of bolting on paperwork.
Handing over fifteen years of work
Planned and executed the transition of the Syngenta platforms to internal teams: documentation, mentoring, and honest conversations about what each team was ready to own.
AI in production
90,000 fields a week
Root Cause, the AI feature my team shipped for Syngenta in 2026, analyzes 90,000 grower fields weekly and surfaces concerns with suggested mitigations. I also run AI-assisted engineering practices and local-model experiments — details on the AI page.