#engineering

Five lines of Python and an API key produce a working demo. The gap between that demo and a production system contains failure modes the prototype...

OCode: Why I Built My Own Claude Code (and Why You Might Too): A few nights ago, I opened my Anthropic invoice.

For every startup that dies from technical debt, ten more die from trying to prevent it too early.

Autonomous agents need the same infrastructure primitives that web services got a decade ago: identity, policy, and secrets as first-class citizens.

Building an LLM-powered evaluation system to measure whether engineering recognition is specific, accurate, and connected to impact.

I kept writing terrible JIRA titles during customer calls. So I built a Chrome extension to fix it.

'This isn't what we asked for.' Five words that strike dread into every engineering team. Five words that signal a fundamental breakdown in the...

The Executive Trap I've seen it happen a dozen times: A brilliant engineer becomes CTO and suddenly decides their job is 'managing the engineering...

I spent $2,000 on hardware that now handles workloads that would cost $500/month on AWS. The cloud is a tax on people who cannot be bothered to learn...

Every security tool comparison site is funded by the vendors being evaluated. This creates a specific, structural problem for security teams making...

The most valuable code I've ever written was messy, quick, and written in response to an immediate customer need.

The most insidious form of technical debt does not come from rushed code or tight deadlines - it comes from overly clever abstractions built too early.

Quality in the wrong places will kill your startup faster than no quality at all. The question is not how much quality, but quality where.

Security review cycles designed for deterministic software are blocking AI adoption. The teams that survive will automate guardrails instead of...

The most expensive software I've ever written was code I wrote 'quickly.' Not because it was complex, but because I wrote it with the intention of...

Every integration you add is a long-term commitment you're not budgeting for. The technical implementation is the easy part.