Est. 2008 · Programming since 1976 · New Hampshire
eDataQuest is the practice of James Rascoe — 50 years fitting the pieces together so businesses make money instead of burning it. Real engineer. Real accountant. Every meaningful platform since the IBM System/360.
The Arc
Five decades of knowing how the pieces fit together — because I was there when they were first connected.
Watergate and disco on the radio. Business ran on room-sized mainframes. I was already inside the glass room, writing the code that ran them.
MTV launched, the Wall came down, and computers landed on desks. I picked up C and never put it down.
Seinfeld on TV, AOL in the mailbox. The web went from nothing to everywhere, and I was building on it the whole time.
Reality TV and the first iPhone. Business moved into the browser and onto virtual machines. I ran a VMware shop from day one.
Netflix killed Blockbuster. Company data left the building. I moved clients to the cloud and kept them shipping.
Pandemic, Zoom, ChatGPT. AI showed up in everyone's browser. Same practice, next chapter.
Every Seat at the Table
I've learned how the pieces fit from every angle — technical, executive, entrepreneurial — and I bring all of them to the table. The job is never just code. It's building the business.
AI Practice
Multi-agent orchestration, document intelligence, and conversational systems running in production — integrated into the business, not bolted on the side. Here's what the practice looks like today.
LangGraphMulti-agent workflows on LangGraph — state machines, tools, and handoffs that actually run in production. Not demo code.
SMS · TwilioAI agents handling real customer SMS over Twilio — intake, triage, and decision-making wired directly into business data.
GeminiIngest arbitrary PDFs and images, extract structured data with Gemini, reconcile against the system of record. Less work, fewer errors.
LangSmithFull-trace visibility with LangSmith — replay every decision, every tool call, every token. Debug AI the way you'd debug code.
Anthropic · OpenAI · GoogleClaude, GPT, Gemini, and local models — picked per task, not per fashion. Cost, latency, and quality are all deliberate choices.
StrategyMost 'AI projects' fail because the problem was wrong. We spend as much time figuring out whether AI is the right tool as we do wiring it up.
Practice Areas
Different entry points — same operating principle: understand the problem, ship what works, cut the ceremony that doesn't serve the outcome.
Full-stack builds — frontend, backend, and the glue. From discovery to production, on stacks built to last.
Kubernetes clusters, ArgoCD pipelines, certificate management, CI/CD. Self-hosted or cloud — the point is you own it.
Big data pipelines, web analytics, and AI agents that actually move work forward. Real answers, not another dashboard.
Discovery engagements to get clear on what you're building — and whether you should build it at all. No techno-babble.
About
I'm James Rascoe. I take ideas and make them real. That's been the job since I was writing production code on IBM iron as a kid. System/360. /370. Midrange. Minis. PCs. Embedded. Servers. Mobile. Cloud. Containers. AI agents. Every platform that's mattered — I've built on it.
I was coding before C existed. When C showed up — a handful of instructions, infinite range — I couldn't put it down. I was a key IBM ISV through the midrange era, shipping real systems on real iron. VMware ESXi shop from day one. I've debugged with punch cards and with LangSmith traces. Same craft every decade: understand the problem, pick the right tool, get it working, keep it working.
The combination is unusual: I'm a real engineer and a real accountant. I read balance sheets and I read assembly. I've worked every angle of the business and served every kind of company there is. That vantage point is what lets me skip the usual fumbling and get straight to the part that matters: how this thing is going to make money.
I founded eDataQuest in 2008 because I kept watching good ideas get stuck in process — committees, decks, roadmaps, staffing cycles — while the actual thing never got built. So I do the opposite. Small practice. Real code. Real infrastructure. Real answers.
Decades in, still shipping every day. Still curious. Still learning whatever's next. The job was never just code — it's putting the pieces together so the business makes money instead of burning it. After a lifetime, you learn the difference.
Bandwidth Available
Describe your idea in plain language. I'll write back within one business day — a real response, not a brochure. Fifty years of knowledge on the other end of the email.