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…
The long story of combining two companies through an acquisition, from a technical perspective, in a little over 5 months. TLDR 2 completely different companies (GETOUTPASS and POGOPASS), were combined into 1 (GETOUT). We sunset 2 legacy platforms, migrated over 350k+ active members (representing over 1M active family pass holders)…
2024 was the year everyone discovered they could ship software without knowing how to write it. Vibe coding. Cursor. Copilot. Claude doing the heavy lifting while humans provided the vibes. 500,000 apps submitted to Apple's App Store last year. Most in over a decade. Not because we…
There, I said it. I've used GraphQL exactly once, and I had inherited it. Someone else's architectural confession left in the codebase like a note that just said "sorry." Never again. "But Jake, you must have had a bad experience with it, or…
You don't need this pattern. But sometimes it makes everything cleaner. Lets first review various scenarios we all have seen, that could take advantage of a different way to handle things. Order checkout: Validate cart → Reserve inventory → Charge payment → Create order record → Send confirmation. Each step has a…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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&…