API FIRST

I enjoyed the monolithic application life. Everything in one place. Gulp files grouping and compiling assets in the same location where my backend dependencies were managed. HTML templates with Backbone.js and Mustache in another directory. Entity mappings right next to the authentication service. Deployment was easy. One platform, replaces…

Your Codebase Returns Booleans, Integers, Exceptions, and Prayers.

You've spent years staring at codebases where every layer speaks a different dialect of failure. This service returns a boolean. That one throws. The other returns negative one because someone in 2014 thought that was clever. Your repository returns null. Your controller catches something, maybe, and logs it…

Engineering Leaders Are Just Cargo Culting With Better Calendars

Oh engineering leaders, gather around. Part 565 of 45345 🍿 You read the same three books, implement the same quarterly theatre, and dont get me started on your hiring problems. You cargo cult the same radical candor frameworks while being neither radical nor candid. You talk about psychological safety in all-hands…

What Is A Domain Event

Domain Events Fire From Domain Logic. Not Repositories. Not Anywhere Else. Domain events fire when something meaningful happens in your system. Not when a row gets inserted. When the business cares. A user didn't get inserted into a table. A user registered. An order wasn't updated…

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&…

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.…

Software Engineers: The Gatekeepers Of Simple Questions

Somewhere along the way we became the tollbooth between the business and their own data (well, ok, actually... this is how its always been. I still remember the platform i built in ~1997 to collect data for an insurance company... getting it to them how they needed, that was... . . . . hey…

AI Certifications are the new fraud. I got one to prove it.

I got certified in pencil sharpening last week. Twelve modules. Forty hours. There was a capstone project. I sharpened a pencil. It was a #2 pencil because, yah. I'm now a Certified Pencil Sharpening Professional (CPSP). Felt important. The course covered the history of pencils. The philosophy of…

The AI Architect Handbook

I wrote another book! He's an outline of whats inside. Chapter 1: Type words into an API integration. Chapter 2: Change the words slightly. Chapter 3: Tell stakeholders you're "tuning the model." Chapter 4: Change the words slightly again. Chapter 5: Change the words…

2026! My first white paper: Agentic AI!

Yup! I still remember my engineering mentor showing me my first white paper in 1995. I didn't understand a word of it (for real it was way over my head but he was a savant). But I knew someday, I too would share my learnings with the world.…