Art is Creation

I believe art is not paintings, sculptures, and drawings. Art is creation. Growing up, I was obsessed with making things. Legos. Staying up late typing random words on the typewriter because the result on that onion paper was incredible. Building forts in the backyard. Creating routes for marbles to follow…

AWS ECS IS KING

I've deployed on everything. EC2 with custom AMIs. EKS. Bare instances. Dell Racks in the closet (this was a pain but needed at Energy Exemplar). Managed Instances. Heroku. DigitalOcean. Google Cloud got heavy at Betterleap where we spun up services constantly. Azure and I have met but we&…

Caring Out Loud Isn't Caring

Virtue signaling is performance art for people who've confused having opinions with having impact. You changed your profile picture. Congratulations. The algorithm noticed. Nobody else did. That's not activism. That's a firmware update for your personal brand. Here's what I've…

Why is everyone suddenly a self proclaimed no-code/ai expert?!

Suddenly everyone can create and build without code and suddenly everyone is an AI expert telling us when we will be replaced. Where were you five years ago? Ten years ago? 20? I've been in software engineering for 25+ years and this hype/story resurfaces all the time.…

Anaconda 2025

This was pleasantly interesting. I was hesitant at first, given the plot: A movie about making a movie about a movie. But knowing it had Jack Black and Paul Rudd, I knew it would be entertaining. The Ice Cube cameo was great, the J. Lo one, not at all -…

Wicked

Hot garbage. Halfway through, I stood up and said "Is this thing still going!?". I will never watch this again.…

Avatar: Fire and Ash

I rate this 2 siamese cats speaking sign language to whales with bull rings. Make this movie make sense - it felt like I was watching something where the plot was dumped out of a bucket of 3rd grade stories and randomly glue-sticked together. Such a disaster when the first…

DARK > Stranger Things

I initially binged Stranger Things like everyone else. The 80s nostalgia hit exactly right and was genuinely my favorite part as I loved my childhood in the 80s. The synth soundtrack, riding around on bikes everywhere everyday, and welcome back Winona Ryder. That first season had real magic to it.…

Hello 2026

The place where I’m Head of Engineering is my biggest headline. Nearly 500k customers, $MMM in processing and revenue, small engineering team, and it feels like the EVALS days again - good people, real impact, actual smiles. Big announcement coming in February 🤫 2026: SMILES X 1290320993930223 šŸ˜ But, as the…

How To Spot A Liar

This video was sent to me by someone who called out this liar before, just as we did. Someone's baseline + deviation. You don't catch liars by looking for nervousness. Nervous people are everywhere. Honest people get nervous. Practiced liars are calm as a lake and paint…