The Starship Was Fine. The Crew Was on Fire.
A few weeks ago, two players in my Star Trek game got into an argument. Not an in-character argument, not Klingons threatening the Federation, and not somebody objecting…
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Why I Still Own a Server Rack in 2026
I have a server rack at home. Not a cute little two-bay NAS tucked under a desk. Between the various machines, there are roughly 200 Xeon cores and…
Read article →The Most Dangerous Sentence in Engineering: “We’ll Add the Safeguards Later.”
There is a sentence that appears in technology projects whenever somebody points out an inconvenient safety requirement during the exciting part of building something: “We’ll add that later.”…
Read article →Five Million Lines of Code Later, Here’s What I Wouldn’t Build Again
Coverity has accumulated something on the order of five million lines of code across its history, branches, generated artifacts and the surrounding ecosystem. Before somebody writes to explain…
Read article →Your Audit Trail Should Survive Your SaaS Vendor
There is a question I wish more companies asked before buying software: if this vendor disappears tomorrow, what evidence do we still have about what happened yesterday? We…
Read article →Stop Replacing Humans With Software. Replace the Phone Calls.
One of the fastest ways to find an automation opportunity is to listen for the sentence, “I’ll call them and find out.” There is nothing inherently wrong with…
Read article →The Best API Is Sometimes a Raspberry Pi With Two Network Cables
Enterprise architecture diagrams have a wonderful tendency to assume every system has an API. Then you walk into an actual office. There is a multifunction printer purchased during…
Read article →I Put AI in the Presentation Layer. That’s Where It Belongs.
Weather With Regerts started as a joke. It has since accumulated thousands of phrases, themed packs, validation rules, deterministic selection, runtime reloads and enough engineering that the joke…
Read article →I Don’t Want an AI House. I Want a House That Works.
I have Home Assistant running enough things in my house that occasionally I have to remind myself the objective was convenience. This is one of the occupational hazards…
Read article →When a Camera Network Becomes a Time Machine
A camera on a road is easy to understand. A car drives past, the camera sees it, and an observation exists. We have had traffic cameras, toll readers…
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