Jun 27, 2026
7 min
The Hype Has Two Sides, We Only Listen to One
I have been noticing something in the conversations lately. Between friends, and inside some companies, the decisions almost always come wrapped in a few articles…
Notes & Thoughts
Notes on building software with business value in mind.
Notes I take while building software. Not tutorials, not truths. Just what I was thinking, feeling and observing at the time, and I reserve the right to change my mind.
Jun 11, 2026
7 min
In the AI Era, Your Taste Is the Job
For most of my career, the hard part of building software was building it. Knowing the syntax, wiring the framework, making the thing run. That is changing fast…
May 27, 2026
6 min
Four Years of Notes, What I Learned About Tech and Business
In June 2022 I pressed publish on the first of these notes. I was nervous about my English, unsure if anyone would read, and not sure I had anything to say that was…
Apr 15, 2026
5 min
What Did Not Change, Liskov, Knuth and the Boring Fundamentals
We are now a few good years into the AI wave. Copilot, then ChatGPT, then agents everywhere. Each wave arrived with the same announcement, everything you know is…
Mar 18, 2026
6 min
AI Writes the Code Now, and Honestly, I Am Fine With That
Nobody argues anymore about whether AI can write code. That debate is over, and it ended quietly. It writes code every day, in my team too. Most of the lines that…
Feb 11, 2026
5 min
Small Team, Big Output, How AI Changed Our Team Size Conversation
There is a planning conversation happening in teams everywhere right now that would have been impossible three years ago. The question on the table is no longer…
Dec 10, 2025
4 min
2025 Review, Agents Everywhere, Fundamentals Still Win
December again. Snow outside the window in Calgary, tea on the desk, and the yearly habit of looking back. I do this review every year on the blog, and 2025…
Oct 15, 2025
5 min
Writing Specs Again, Clear Requirements Matter More With AI
Something funny happened in my work this year. I spend more time writing than coding. Not code comments, not documentation after the fact. I mean specs. Real…
Aug 13, 2025
5 min
Should We Still Hire Junior Developers in the AI Era?
I keep hearing the same question in meetings, in podcasts, and in chats with friends. If AI can do the work of a junior developer, why should we hire junior…
Jun 11, 2025
5 min
Legacy Code Plus AI, a New Hope for Old Systems
Every company past a certain age has one. The system nobody wants to touch. It runs something important, it makes money or moves money, the people who built it are…
Apr 16, 2025
5 min
AI Gets Tasks, I Keep Decisions
For the past month I have been working with one of the new agentic coding tools. I paid for a Cursor subscription out of my own pocket, just to test it properly for…
Mar 12, 2025
5 min
Vibe Coding, What Is It, Dev?
About a month ago, Andrej Karpathy gave a name to something many of us were already doing. He called it vibe coding. You describe what you want to the AI, you…
Jan 15, 2025
5 min
MCP, a USB Port for AI
In late November, Anthropic released something called the Model Context Protocol, or MCP. It did not get the attention that a new model launch gets. No benchmark…
Dec 11, 2024
4 min
2024 Review, The Year AI Moved From Toy to Tool
Every December I write a small review of the year, mostly for myself. Writing forces me to be honest about what actually changed and what was just noise. And 2024…
Nov 13, 2024
5 min
Code Runs on Money
There is a meeting that happens in every company sooner or later. The bill goes up, and a finance person asks a simple question. Why did our cloud cost jump this…
Oct 16, 2024
6 min
Observability, the Art of Ending the Guessing Meeting
There is a special kind of meeting that I have attended too many times in my career. Something is wrong in production. Users are complaining. And the room is full…
Oct 2, 2024
5 min
A Safe Way Into Legacy Code, the Sprout Method
A few weeks ago I wrote that rewriting from scratch is almost never the answer. That leaves an honest question hanging in the air. If I should not burn the old code…
Sep 18, 2024
5 min
Never Rewrite From Scratch, Unless You Can Prove It
There is a sentence I have said, and heard, in almost every company I worked for. You open an old part of the system, the code is ugly, the logic is tangled, and…
Jul 17, 2024
5 min
Micro Frontends Are the Price of Team Autonomy
Micro frontends are one of those ideas that sound like a free upgrade. Split the frontend like we split the backend. Each team owns a slice of the UI, builds it…
Jun 12, 2024
5 min
AI Agents Hype, What Works Today and What Is Just Demo
Every week now somebody sends me a video. An AI agent that books a flight. An agent that builds a whole app from one sentence. An agent army that runs a software…
May 15, 2024
5 min
OOP Is About Messages, Not Classes
Alan Kay invented the term object oriented programming. He also spent decades telling everyone that we got it wrong. There is a famous line from him, something…
Apr 24, 2024
7 min
A New Hire in the Dark Is the Most Expensive Hire
Last week I wrote about developer experience and how friction quietly burns payroll. There is one moment where that waste is the most brutal and the most invisible…
Apr 17, 2024
5 min
Developer Experience, Happy Devs Ship More
There is a meeting that happens in every company. Someone asks why the team is not shipping faster. Someone suggests hiring more people. Almost nobody asks the…
Mar 13, 2024
5 min
AI Code, Where the Bug Wears a Nice Suit
I use AI assistants almost every day now. They save me time. I am not going to pretend they do not. But something happened in the last year that worries me, and a…
Feb 14, 2024
6 min
RAG Explained for Business People
Every week now somebody asks me a version of the same question. "Can we have a ChatGPT, but for our own data?" A leader wants a bot that answers questions about…
Jan 17, 2024
5 min
The DDD Red Book Gave Me Monday Morning
In the domain driven design world, people talk about two books by color. The blue book is Eric Evans, Domain-Driven Design, from 2003. The red book is Vaughn…
Dec 13, 2023
5 min
Messy Code Is Not Ugly, It Is Expensive
Kent Beck published a new book a few weeks ago. It is called Tidy First? and it is tiny. You can read it in two evenings. I did, and then I read it again, slower…
Oct 18, 2023
5 min
Event Sourcing, When the Auditor Knocks You Smile
There is a special kind of fear that lives in software teams that handle money. It is the fear of the question "can you prove what happened?" An auditor asks it. A…
Sep 13, 2023
5 min
Pair Programming With an AI, My Workflow After One Year
I have been using GitHub Copilot every day for more than a year now. ChatGPT joined the desk later, first the free version, then GPT-4 when it came out in March…
Aug 16, 2023
5 min
Feature Flags, Ship Fast Without Breaking Production
There is a moment every developer knows. The deploy finishes, the new feature goes live for everybody at the same time, and you sit there watching the error…
Jul 19, 2023
5 min
Premature Optimization, What Knuth Really Said
Everybody knows the quote. "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." Donald Knuth wrote it in 1974, in a paper called Structured Programming with go to…
Jun 14, 2023
5 min
Prompt Engineering for Developers, Less Magic, More Method
Since GPT-4 came out in March, my feed is full of prompt magicians. Threads with "10 secret prompts that will change your life". Number 7 will shock you . Courses…
May 17, 2023
4 min
Platform Engineering, New Name or Real Change?
If you opened any tech conference agenda in the last year, you saw it. Platform engineering is the new term everywhere. Gartner put it on their hype lists, vendors…
Apr 19, 2023
5 min
Clean Architecture for Small Teams, What to Use and What to Skip
Every few months I review a codebase from a small team that read Uncle Bob's Clean Architecture book and applied all of it. Entities, use cases, interface adapters…
Mar 15, 2023
5 min
Refactoring Is Not Cleaning, It Is Investing
I want to talk about a word problem. Developers ask product managers for "cleanup time" and product managers say no. Then developers get frustrated and say the…
Feb 15, 2023
4 min
Monolith First, Why I Stopped Saying Microservices for Everything
I have a confession. Around 2016 I was the guy in meetings saying we should break everything into microservices. It was the modern thing, the conference talks were…
Jan 18, 2023
5 min
ChatGPT Arrived, Should Developers Be Scared?
It has been six weeks since ChatGPT launched and I have not seen the industry this agitated in years. Half of my feed says programming is dead. The other half says…
Dec 14, 2022
4 min
Six Months With GitHub Copilot, an Honest Review
Copilot became generally available in June this year. I turned it on the same week and I never turned it off. Six months is enough time to have a real opinion, not…
Nov 16, 2022
5 min
Bounded Contexts Stop Teams From Stepping on Each Other
Here is a question that looks innocent. In your company, what is a customer?
Oct 19, 2022
5 min
Design Patterns Are Old, So Why Do They Still Pay the Bills
The Design Patterns book came out in 1994. That is twenty eight years ago. In software time, that is several geological eras. Languages died and were born, the web…
Sep 14, 2022
6 min
TDD Is Not Slow, Bugs Are Slow
Every few months someone (I prefer not to say who ) tells me the same thing. "We do not have time for TDD. We need to ship fast." I always answer with a question…
Aug 17, 2022
6 min
Hexagonal Architecture Helped Me Change a Database Without Crying
There is a special kind of fear that lives in software teams. It is the fear of the big migration. Changing the database, changing a critical vendor, changing the…
Jul 20, 2022
5 min
What the Liskov Principle Saved Me From
Of all the SOLID principles, the Liskov Substitution Principle is the one with the scariest name and the simplest idea. Today I want to explain it the way I wish…
Jul 6, 2022
7 min
Five Years in Canada, the Story of a Frozen Dream
Five years ago this month I landed in Canada. July of 2017. Two suitcases, my family, and a one way plan. A few months before that, I had sold my share of…
Jun 15, 2022
5 min
Code Review Is Not About Ego, It Is About Money
I have been doing code reviews for a long time. First as the person being reviewed, then as the reviewer, and now, at Benevity, as a senior developer who reviews a…