It has been over six years since my last post. Life happened. Covid happened. Work happened. I got heads-down on a challenging role and let the blog go dark. That’s on me and I’m here to course correct.
What I’ve Been Doing
When I last posted in 2019, I had just started a new job doing Clojure development on Mac — a pretty significant departure for someone with roughly 14 years of Delphi followed by 16 years of C# and .NET on Windows. That role has lasted considerably longer than I originally expected. I’ve spent the intervening years building complex systems in Clojure on the JVM, working with cloud infrastructure and generally living deep in a technology stack I would not have predicted for myself.
Working on Mac full-time has been its own education. Under the hood it’s built on UNIX and that part is genuinely great — I routinely have several terminal windows open with multiple tabs in each and the low-level, non-GUI development experience is solid. The GUI side is another story. Finder is an exercise in frustration, window drag handles are elusive and Apple’s philosophical commitment to “there is one correct way to do everything and you will conform” runs directly counter to how I think software should work. I believe software should adapt to the user and present multiple ways of accomplishing the same task — menus, toolbars, keyboard shortcuts — and be customizable. Apple believes users should adapt to the software. We disagree. But that’s maybe a topic for its own post.
Where My Head Is At
AI is, by any reasonable measure, the most important shift in software development in decades. Possibly ever. My interest in it isn’t new — I’ve been thinking seriously about the trajectory of artificial intelligence since around 2000 and I’ve been anticipating something like what we’re seeing now for a long time. What’s changed in the last couple of years is that the tools have matured to the point where they’re practically useful and the rate of progress has become impossible to ignore even for skeptics.
My employer has made it very clear that understanding and leveraging AI isn’t optional — it’s expected. And I agree with them on that. So I’ve been investing significant time into going deep: agents, local LLM inference, security and hardening, infrastructure and the practical realities of building real systems around these technologies. This is where the industry is going and I plan to be ahead of it rather than chasing it.
What I’ll Be Writing About
This blog is going to be a place where I share what I’m learning, what I’m building and what I think about all of it. Honestly. The tone will be direct. I’m not going to sugar coat things, I’m not going to toe any corporate lines and I’m not going to pretend to agree with “best practices” that are performative rather than practical. Where the facts don’t line up with the popular consensus, I’m going to go with the facts.
Expect posts on AI — agents, tooling, local inference, security and what it’s actually like to stand up the infrastructure to support all of this. The technology stack will lean heavily on C# with .NET and TypeScript where the choice is mine to make, because they’re mature, productive, broadly capable platforms. But I also have years of Clojure experience and some rather pointed opinions that have been building up. Those will make an appearance.
I’ll also be writing about infrastructure, networking, self-hosting and hardware — because the local AI space is evolving fast and the decisions around it matter more than most people realize.
The Short Version
I’m back. I have things to say. Some of it will be useful, some of it will be opinionated and I’ll do my best to make sure all of it is honest.
More to come.
Comments closed