Posts

Assumed Audience Engineers probably, tech leads, CTOs, etc. Anyone interested in adding useful AI to their software development. As I was bolting on more and more autonomous AI agents at Energyworx this past year, I kept looking for the next bit of low-hanging fruit. Turns out there’s already a framework that maps where it all is: the SDLC. The Software Development Lifecycle which my OCD thinks should clearly be called “SDL”, but I digress is a pattern to describe how software ideally gets from not existing to “Computo, ergo sum.” ...

Assumed Audience Anyone using AI to build/maintain many projects; technical or not. I’ve been telling people to do this for a while now. Then I got the exact chance to do it myself, and I didn’t. And thus follows a story of regret and resolve: I preach thusly: Every time a smarter AI system becomes available to you (a new model is the obvious one, but a higher effort level could count too, or a better harness, you name it), you should run a check over all your (active) projects to see if it finds problems, inefficiencies, or even a completely different approach you (or older models) simply never considered. ...

Assumed Audience Anyone running or planning cloud infrastructure and/or running applications on that. Plus those interested in a way to annoy quite a few DevOps people. When people hear that I promote using Terraform for the whole stack, I almost always get this: “For the infra, sure. But for the application: why not Ansible? Why not Argo? Why not Kustomize? Why not <insert tool here>.” So here’s the thing. In my humble opinion: If you’re running Kubernetes, Terraform should be doing the application layer too. Not just the VPC, the cluster, the firewall. Also the deployments, the services, the cronjobs, the persistent volumes. All of it. And I’ll make you understand why. Through the power of song… Ehm, no. Let’s just do; long winded tales of personal experience. Settle in, kids! Let’s bring out the time machine. ...

Assumed Audience Anyone curious about AI and what it means for expertise. There’s this idea going around that AI is the great equalizer. “If everyone gets the same AI, anyone can do everything as good as anyone else.” When I first heard it I couldn’t put a finger on why that felt wrong to me. But I think I can show you why; and as a nature lover I’m only a little sad that it’s a city skyline. ...

Assumed Audience People who work with AI daily, or are starting to, and have complicated feelings about it. I don’t think I’ve ever had so much fun in my programming career as I do now. Which is strange, because a few weeks ago I was in a very different place. I was watching - in horror - as the machine on my desk was taking over my craft. Like most people I guess, I derive quite a lot of my identity from that craft; hence the horror. (Let’s ignore for now whether that’s a good thing or not.) ...