About Erich Donahue

I’m a decision-science product and data-platform leader in the Orlando area, which is a long way of saying I build tools that help people decide things. That is the short version. Most of the work I enjoy sits in the part of the job nobody puts on a slide, where the product question and the technical question turn out to be the same question and somebody still has to clean up the pipeline afterward.

My path ran from branch operations and regulated financial-services analytics through Capital One digital product analytics and into Disney Parks & Resorts decision science. Along the way I’ve managed analysts, taught technical curriculum, and spent about a year retiring 58 legacy SAS jobs into Python and SQL that someone can actually maintain, which was far more satisfying than it probably sounds. Nobody misses those jobs.

Outside of work I keep an Open Workbench of local-first apps and hardware experiments. Discogs Spinner browses my vinyl collection without making me open a browser tab and scroll a long account page. Endless Loader and FxPatchSDK handle Polyend Endless pedal workflows. There is usually a Raspberry Pi doing something in the next room, and lately a local LLM running on the workstation that I’m still learning my way around, which so far has been more fun than it has been useful.

My desk is usually some mix of analytics work, guitar gear, a record I meant to catalog, and a hardware experiment that needs one more cable than I own.

The thread through all of it is that I really like tools that are useful at the desk, the small kind that make a messy system easier to understand than it was an hour ago. A dashboard counts. So does a record picker.