I Use AI to Build Software. I Don't Vibe Code.
Why AI use is not an engineering red flag, how experience changes what the tool can safely accelerate, and what hiring teams should evaluate instead.
Blog
Notes from twenty years of shipping.
Notes on production systems, architecture tradeoffs, AI-assisted development, and the judgment that only comes from shipping.
What I Built So Far in 2026
A candid look at what I shipped, rebuilt, unpublished, and learned in 2026—and why I still want to carry ideas all the way into production.
Your Error Messages Are Part of the Product
Why error handling is a routing decision, and how specific messages reduce user confusion, support work, and the time engineers spend reconstructing failures.
I Hated ASP.NET Web Forms. It Was Still Ahead of Its Time.
Why ASP.NET Web Forms frustrated me, what Ruby on Rails taught me about traditional web development, and how modern frontend frameworks changed my view of its component model.
The delete that didn't happen
Twelve thousand records, one wrong environment, and ninety seconds of certainty that my career was over. Why I now build systems that assume people will make mistakes.
Why Senior Developers Often Sound Slower
What senior engineering judgment looks like before implementation, and why questions about failure, ownership, and reversibility usually shorten the work rather than delay it.
The Best Stack Is the One Your Team Can Debug at 2 A.M.
Why team familiarity, visible failure modes, and operational simplicity matter more than novelty when choosing a stack for software the business must continue to own.
Why I Stopped Defaulting to React
Why I returned to server-rendered Rails and Laravel for many business applications after years of working across JavaScript frameworks, mobile apps, and separate frontend architectures.
Users Will Find a Way Around Your Product
What unofficial customer workflows reveal about product design, and how to decide whether to pave, tolerate, or block the path users created for themselves.
Expo Is Great Until the App Needs Something Native
What moving a production app from native iOS to React Native and Expo taught me about abstraction, hardware integrations, and choosing where to own mobile complexity.
The Clipboard Was Doing More Work Than We Thought
What building field software taught me about paper workflows, tacit knowledge, and why digitization is a product-design problem before it is a data-entry problem.
The Rails App That Outlived Its Original Requirements
What a long-lived Ruby on Rails pricing portal taught me about small software, changing requirements, and the value of choosing a stack you can keep understanding.