In 2012, at EVALS, I had a major problem on day one of our launch. "The wheels are falling of the go-cart!!" We were on site at a major fire academy. 300 users on 300 iPads, recording videos, photos, and notes in real time. All of it flowing…
You don't know what sudo is anymore. You're shipping production three abstraction layers deep thinking the cloud is a place. It's not a place. It's a building in Virginia that smells like burnt dust and has a bizarre buzzing noise that nobody…
If your software infrastructure and architecture needs AI to "produce incredible output," you've already lost. You're clearly coping for not knowing how to build systems that are maintainable, scalable, or reliable. Therefore....... AI. CANT. FIX. YOUR. BAD. FOUNDATIONS. It will just make them fail…
What if the next hype is eating crayons? LinkedIn Titles/Tags in 48 hours: 🖍️CRAYON-NATIVE ARCHITECT 🖍️CRAYON EATING EVANGELIST 🖍️STRATEGIC CRAYON CONSUMPTION ADVISOR "Most people are eating crayons wrong. Here's my 7-step framework." "Just mass-recruited 400 people who've been eating crayons since 2019.…
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…
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…
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…