Page 3 of 4 — notes on engineering, AI and the cloud.
FinOpsA client's AI bill went up 22x with no change in users. Nothing was broken — no mechanism in the system could have noticed the same document being summarised twelve times a day.
Read More
Platform EngineeringTheir guide to deploying a new service was 31 steps long and referenced a person who had left. They had every tool. What they lacked was a path.
Read More
AI Coding ToolsOur bot left 23 comments on a 200-line PR and people stopped reading it. One of those comments was about an unhandled null nobody saw.
Read More
MCPI wrote the same database integration four times for four AI tools. MCP is the standard that collapses those four wrappers into one server.
Read More
Context EngineeringI spent two days rewriting a prompt that was never the problem. The instruction that mattered was buried at the 40% mark of a 60,000-token window.
Read More
Quantum ComputingShould you learn quantum computing to stay employable? Honestly, no. But one part of this topic belongs on a normal engineering roadmap right now.
Read More
Emerging TechnologiesEvery year the trend slides arrive and someone asks about quantum computing. Here's the three-question filter I use before letting any trend touch a roadmap.
Read More
Robotics"Your bug throws an exception. Mine breaks something, or someone." Almost everything strange about robotics engineering follows from that one difference.
Read More
Web DevelopmentThe hardest part of shipping web and mobile together isn't the code — every decision now has two answers. Here's what's worth sharing, and what definitely isn't.
Read More
AI AutomationA client showed me a 34-step Zap that broke twice a week. The fix wasn't a better tool — it was noticing that business logic had grown inside a plumbing tool.
Read More
Generative AIThe demo took two days. Then came four months of questions: what stops a runaway bill, who is on call when the provider breaks, and how do we price this?
Read More
Data ScienceSomeone asked me which ML course to take first. They had never written a SQL query. Here's the order I'd learn data skills in — from the engineer's side of the fence.
Read More
DatabasesThey chose MongoDB because their data was flexible. Eighteen months on they were doing three-collection lookups per request and repairing orphans every night.
Read More
DevOpsNothing gets merged until the pipeline can deploy it — not even an empty app. It costs a day up front and removes the worst week in software delivery.
Read More
Software DevelopmentOur pull requests got 40% larger and review time went up, not down. That sounds like a failure — it was actually the moment I understood what AI coding tools really do to a team.
Read More
Cloud SecurityI found a role with AdministratorAccess attached to a public web server. The ticket that created it two years earlier described the change as temporary.
Read More
Cloud ComputingA founder asked whether to migrate clouds to save $200 a month. We tuned what they had instead and cut the bill by a third in a week. Provider choice matters less.
Read More
Zero TrustThe rollout started with a network policy change on a Friday. It broke a job nobody knew existed. After that, every change took three months of negotiation.
Read More
CybersecurityThe phishing email that nearly caught one of our developers had perfect grammar and named a real project. AI broke the old warning signs — architecture still holds.
Read More
AI AgentsGartner put multiagent systems on its 2026 trend list and suddenly everyone needs agents. Here's where agentic AI earns its keep — and when a plain workflow beats it.
Read More