About The Kelsicks | Technology Made Understandable

Complicated technology, made understandable.

The Kelsicks is an independent Seattle practice for organizations and people who want technology to stop being a recurring mystery. I find the real problem, explain it clearly, fix it, and write down what your team needs to know.

The work is led by Izzy Kelsick. Twelve years in finance and public infrastructure — and current responsibility for the workplace technology behind roughly 15,000 Windows and Mac devices — provide the depth behind that plain-English approach.

Chemistry, then a trading floor.

I started in chemistry at Dominica State College, and finished in information technology at Borough of Manhattan Community College. It's a strange line on a résumé and it turned out to be the most useful thing about me.

Chemistry teaches one habit above all others: write down exactly what you did, in what order, in what quantity — because a result you can't reproduce isn't a result, it's an anecdote. That is also, almost exactly, the argument for managing infrastructure as code.

My first technology job was real-time support on a trading floor in 2014 — Bloomberg terminals, low-latency systems, and several hundred people whose morning does not tolerate an outage. You learn fast there that "I fixed it" is worth very little if nobody can say what you changed.

A ladder of consequence, not a tour of employers.

Private bankingAn enterprise Windows 10 migration in a regulated environment, and an early hybrid-identity build at a time when very few banks had one.

Public infrastructure50,000 endpoints hardened to NIST guidelines for a metropolitan transit authority.

Quantitative tradingWindows platform engineering for a hedge fund: 5,000 endpoints, and a thousand on-premise machines moved to virtual desktop.

Private equityA greenfield Intune and Entra ID build for more than 10,000 endpoints, and the macOS platform alongside it — which became the 15,000-device fleet I run today.

Make changes safely. Know what happened. Be able to put it back.

Large organizations often use one system for Windows, another for Mac, and a third for phones. Costs overlap, rules disagree, and nobody is certain which system is authoritative. I bring that work into one place and give the team a controlled way to change it.

In practice, that means every proposed change is recorded and checked. It reaches a small test group before it reaches thousands. If a change would suddenly affect every device, it stops for a named person to review — and if the system cannot establish that the change is safe, it stops rather than guessing.

The environment is also captured every night, with each change tied to the person who made it. There are more than three years of searchable history and 936 recovery points. If someone asks who changed this, when, and can we put it back, the answer should not be a shrug.

Four things you can hold me to.

I write things down.

Most problems I'm called into aren't technology problems. They're a decision nobody recorded, made three years ago, that everyone has been working around ever since. So I start with a document — what's happening, what it costs, what changes if you fix it. Half the value of an engagement is over before anyone touches a console, because once a thing is written down accurately the right answer is usually obvious and the argument stops.

I build to be left.

Contribution guides, script templates, runbooks, a recorded handover. The measure of a good engagement is that your team runs it after I'm gone.

I don't sell hardware and I don't mark it up.

When a build needs a box, you buy the box at cost and I show you the receipt.

And I'll tell you when something is a bad idea

— including when the thing you asked for isn't the thing you need.

MCSE: Cloud Platform and Infrastructure · MCSA: Windows 10 · Seattle, WA · View résumé →

Building something where I actually am.

I moved here from New York in September 2023, for my family. Three years on I still work New York hours, which is a strange way to live in a city.

The Kelsicks is partly how I'm fixing that — building something where I actually am, for people I'm going to run into again.

So alongside the enterprise work there's Small Systems: the same engineering, scaled down to one shop, one practice, one household. If your work lives on a hard drive that rides around in a bag, that page is for you.

Consume less. Contribute more. Repair over acquisition.

Most organizations don't have a technology problem. They have an accumulation problem — another tool, another subscription, another appliance, while the original issue sits underneath, load-bearing and unexamined. The fix is almost never more. It's usually the thing you already own, set up correctly, with one clear place for everything to live.