It’s everywhere. Job postings. Tech articles. LinkedIn thought leaders are doing their thing. Every other sentence has “agentic AI” in it, like everyone already knows what it means, and you’re […]
Meet the AIs: A Field Test Nobody Asked For
A few weeks ago I was told to “learn and use Anthropic.” I stared at that for a second. What is Anthropic? And what is Claude? Crap. Another AI tool. […]
When “Just One More Option” Stops Working
This app started simple. A few dropdowns.A few options.Nothing worth overthinking. Then came the classic pattern: “I’ll just add one more.” And to be fair—it was easy.Just hardcode another option […]
The Actual Weather
Ever wonder what the actual weather is? I don’t mean the vague, hand-wavy forecast you get from “The Weather Channel,” AccuWeather, WeatherBug, or whichever app currently owns your home screen. […]
Learning TypeScript
Recently, I saw an article that TypeScript is now #1 on GitHub! That is what I used for writing the Mensa Member Connection app. Last week, I had another technical […]
Releasing the Mensa App: Lessons from a Six-Week Sprint
The Mensa App is live and fully functional! After a six-week sprint, this lightweight networking platform is now in the hands of a small group of Mensa members across several […]
Kicking Off the Mensa Networking App: Choosing a Stack That Actually Makes Sense
When the Mensa networking app landed in my lap, the first thing I had to do was pick the stack. And honestly, none of this came from hype or “developer […]
Square Dancing and Unexpected Connections
Square dancing might seem like an unusual addition to a tech-heavy life, but it’s become one of my anchors. Every week — sometimes two or even three times — I […]
Ratatouille: Summer in a Pot
Cooking has always been more than just preparing food for me. Some recipes are quick fixes, and some are meditative journeys. This summer, I returned to one of my all-time […]
Morning Hikes in the Foothills
I’ve always loved being near the foothills of the Sierra Nevada — the way the morning sunlight filters through the trees, the smell of pine and damp earth after a […]
Job App Tracker AWS Promotion
Getting my application finally running on AWS was its own hurdle. AWS gives us so many choices, that we can easily suffer paralysis by analysis. That happened to me a […]
Production Readiness Features
When getting ready for a final move to production, there are a few things one needs to review: performance and monitoring. This brought out the last few items that I […]
Setting up AWS Production MariaDB
This was an extremely exciting and pivotal milestone: I “set up” my AWS Production MariaDB. Kind of. Honestly, the AWS RDS options can feel… pricy for somebody with limited funds. […]
Docker
Getting Docker set up for my project was a HUGE step for me. I’ve never played with docker before, yet it has shown up in at least two separate interview […]
Frontyard Garden Hardscape
Many people who know me know that I’m not a cold-weather person. Yes, in Sacramento, the winters are “cold”, with the lows in the lower 40s and sometimes in the […]
Django API Documentation
Honestly, most engineers and developers do not like to do that thing called “documentation”. It has been longer than I’m willing to admit here since I was in college. Back […]
React User Authentication
This month has been crazy learning about a TON of new and different “user security” topics. It was very overwhelming at times. Here are all of the different aspects of […]
Django RESTful User Functions and Data Security
This month has been crazy learning about a TON of new and different “user security” topics. It was very overwhelming at times with the variety of different solutions to chose […]
Django Adding Users into Database
Adding in multi-user support was no easy feat! I’m used to the agile development of multi-sprint practices in other MVC frameworks where you can add and change any module or […]
React Fundamentals in Django Job Hunt App
Long ago, while I was at CalPERS, I got to explore some with React. I went through two minor tutorials, just to then be exposed to an employee’s implementation of […]
Becoming an AWS Cloud Engineer
Yeah, it finally happened. I knew it would happen sooner than later. The power of being a cloud engineer is having a more price-sensitive VPS solution. My original timetable was […]
Learning Django
Ever since learning about the existence of Django, Python’s MVC framework, I’ve wanted to learn how to use it. By now, I’ve played with quite a few other MVC frameworks […]
A Short 12-Mile Bike Ride
People who know me know that there is more to my life than software and gardening. In the warmer months, I try to go on daily bike rides! On days […]
Maintaining a Ruby on Rails App
I’ve used a few different kinds of languages and frameworks. Adding new features to a Ruby on Rails application has been really easy. In fact, sitting down to glance at […]
Learning AWS
Since September 2023, I’ve looked at thousands of job postings (I’ve applied to over 1,000…). I would venture to say that, definitely for full stack related jobs (and back end […]
Laravel and React
Laravel is not new to me, despite my resume possibly suggesting that. I wrote a CMS app using the Laravel Blade architecture back in 2016. At the time, I wasn’t […]
PHP Drops in TIOBE Index
When I learned that PHP significantly dropped in the TIOBE index back in April 2024, I was not surprised. Over the past year, having seen how the job market is […]
Backyard Garden Softscape
For those of us in the gardening community, there is a distinct difference between the “hardscape” and the “softscape”. The hardscape is all that big, heavy, “not alive” stuff: wood, […]
Mini Yii App Thoughts
Okay, I’ve played with a few frameworks now. CalPERS had its own custom PHP-based MVC framework. Then I played with Laravel and Ruby on Rails. But nothing prepared me for […]
Deploying my first Ruby on Rails App
OMG, I never would have thought that deploying a Ruby on Rails app would have been so incredibly difficult! Building the app and testing it on my laptop was very […]
Backyard Garden Hardscape
The handful of people who really know me, know that I have a few favorite hobbies… one of which is “gardening”. Yeah, I put that into quotes because for me, […]
Learning Python
I’ve self-taught myself a lot of programming languages over the years. Yes, I kind of struggled with MS-BASIC back when I was in high school. Truth is, there wasn’t any […]
My Introduction to Ruby on Rails
I went through a job change in September and October 2023. People would often tell me “You’ll easily get a new job”. They couldn’t be farther from the truth! Despite […]
First WordPress Page!
This is my first WordPress site. There have been a few interesting quirks that I’ve learned. Poking around the user interface has been relatively intuitive. But there were a few […]