Saturday, March 21 2026 - 1,970 words (8 minutes)

How I built an AI-powered Dungeon Master for family D&D nights. There's no session prep required. Using flat files, git, and a workflow bridge between Claude Code and Gemini or Claude mobile live mode, our AI-driven DM handles narration, rule mechanics, and state management across any device. This post is a practical look at orchestrating LLM strengths rather than building from scratch.

Sunday, March 8 2026 - 1,583 words (6 minutes)

Picking a managed cache service early in the project came with hidden infrastructure costs I hadn't questioned in months. Learning to write detailed specs and architecture docs before touching code let me migrate to a simpler data layer, deploy without hand-holding, and cut my monthly bill by 85%. The bigger lesson is that comprehensive planning unlocks AI autonomy and architectural knowledge you don't have can come from the docs you give your AI tools.

Friday, September 12 2025 - 1,665 words (6 minutes)

My experience using Claude Code to refactor from containers to serverless infrastructure revealed the hidden costs of AI-assisted development. A $1.50 code generation task turned into weeks of debugging AWS IAM policies and VPC networking issues, teaching me that different AI tools excel at different tasks and that production infrastructure complexity still requires human expertise.

Tuesday, September 2 2025 - 1,668 words (8 minutes)

Follow this technical product manager's journey back into coding through building a wine pairing AI app. Learn how to build AI web apps fast with Go, AlpineJS, and Docker. Practical guide covering AI-as-backend-logic, caching strategies, and developer experience decisions for rapid AI prototyping without tooling overhead.

Thursday, August 28 2025 - 1,679 words (7 minutes)

Follow this technical product manager's journey back into coding through building a wine pairing AI app. Learn practical prompt engineering techniques, AWS Bedrock model comparison strategies, and meta-prompting optimization using Claude Sonnet 4 to improve Claude Haiku 3.5 performance. Includes real examples and takeaways for developers and PMs ramping up on AI development.

Saturday, March 20 2021 - 1,515 words (6 minutes)

When we think about products, we often think about capabilities and features. We think about the technologies and functionality a product has that a customer would want to pay for. I think of this as "inside out" thinking. Instead, I want to show you how to think about user outcomes first and how to compose them from smaller atomic ideas.

Thursday, February 11 2021 - 872 words (3 minutes)

As a product manager, I need a way to keep track of my various projects and investments. More importantly, I want to maintain the proper blend of projects for exploring new ideas and exploiting existing ones. I will show you a simple tool I'm using to keep track.

Monday, February 8 2021 - 2,040 words (8 minutes)

An overview of my most recent site redesign. Without abandoning the best parts of building and managing a statically-generated website, I'll show you how using modern web technologies like Gatsby.js, React, GitHub actions, and AWS S3 has made this process even easier.

Monday, July 30 2018 - 1,721 words (7 minutes)

A quick overview, guide, and checklist for moving a static site hosted on AWS S3 from HTTP to HTTPS with AWS Cloudfront. I also discuss why you should consider securing your site, even if it is a simple static one like mine.

Monday, June 11 2018 - 3,123 words (12 minutes)

A guide and framework for job seekers and hiring managers to evaluate alignment in job opportunities in a career context. This comes from a background of a career in software engineering, but should be useful for anyone.

Thursday, June 7 2018 - 2,216 words (9 minutes)

Reflections from riding around the sun 31 times. Insights drawn from things like children and parenting, autism, ethnicity and racism, community orientation and global citizenship, and understanding my privilege in a changing world.

Tuesday, June 5 2018 - 3,361 words (18 minutes)

An explanation and guide through NAP audits across a domain for local SEO using command-line tools like curl, jq, pup, and csvkit.

Monday, May 28 2018 - 1,256 words (5 minutes)

This is what happens when you decided to implement your own blog generator, change the OS on your laptop, get a new job, and move.

Wednesday, August 13 2014 - 461 words (2 minutes)

Let's hack the standard Startup Weekend experience. Meetups and workshops have potential to amplify the experience for veterans and brand new entrepreneurs. In this post, I talk about what we have tried in Seattle.

Wednesday, August 6 2014 - 802 words (3 minutes)

The browser can feel like a playground to a passionate web developer as he or she moves HTML around on the page. As builders of the web, we must have a sense of empathy as we construct the playground. In this post, I explore some HTML tricks I've picked up, and why they didn't make good interfaces.

Tuesday, March 20 2012 - 384 words (1 minutes)

Some opening thoughts as I begin on a book cherished among engineers, thinkers, and philosophers alike.

Monday, March 19 2012 - 868 words (3 minutes)

Small, concise programs that do one thing well are a hallmark of the UNIX philosopy. With modern technologies, we are able to build new tools to solve new problems. This post covers using README-driven development and CoffeeScript to build a small command-line link storage tool called link-keeper.

Wednesday, March 14 2012 - 37 words (1 minutes)

A quick link to a post about a design philosophy I like.

Saturday, March 10 2012 - 1,136 words (4 minutes)

Blending more design thinking into my development process. This is an installment in a multi-post series of exploring a better relationship between the disciplines of product design and software engineering.

Monday, March 5 2012 - 635 words (2 minutes)

Blending more design thinking into my development process. This is an installment in a multi-post series of exploring a better relationship between the disciplines of product design and software engineering.

Monday, August 29 2011 - 710 words (3 minutes)

Blending problem-solving, a rediscovery of Ruby, and basic software engineering to solve problems in childcare.

Sunday, July 10 2011 - 342 words (1 minutes)

Leveraging software in What's for Dinner to help couples plan their meals together simultaneously without having to be in the same room.

Wednesday, July 6 2011 - 136 words (1 minutes)

An update on my What's For Dinner project, in this post I discuss some possible directions as I consider how the project might grow.

Tuesday, July 5 2011 - 559 words (2 minutes)

My adventure in Colombian cooking! I share my attempt at frying plantains and think about other connections I'd like to make to my heritage through cooking.

Tuesday, July 5 2011 - 633 words (2 minutes)

A run-down through my various side-projects. Read through what I've been working on and check out links to code, demos, and lessons learned.

Monday, June 20 2011 - 332 words (1 minutes)

A brief update on my What's For Dinner project where I share some tools I made to make the meal planning tool a little easier to use.

Sunday, June 12 2011 - 343 words (1 minutes)

A brief update on my What's For Dinner project. I talk about some UX improvements I've made and

Monday, June 6 2011 - 866 words (3 minutes)

Here are some things we all have in common - 1) we all must eat, 2) we all spend money on food, 3) we all could benefit from a better approach to meal planning. This post begins my story as I set out to build a web application to help my wife and I plan meals together.