Author: dan

We have spent decades making HTTPS better. Today, when I connect to my bank, Google, Amazon, or almost any other major website, my browser performs a remarkably sophisticated series of cryptographic checks. It verifies the site’s TLS certificate, checks that the certificate chains back to a trusted Certificate Authority, makes sure the certificate matches the…

You hover your inspector over a tiny icon. You see background-position: -832px -47px. You blink. You scroll to the top of the stylesheet and find a single PNG weighing 4.2 megabytes. You close the inspector and never speak of it again. To the young web developer: you will never know this pain. Nor this beauty.…

Dear Medium, I recently tried to downgrade or cancel what I believed was my Medium membership. That should have been a routine task. Instead, I discovered something rather strange: Medium has apparently been charging me $5 per month for three years for a membership that my Medium account says I do not have. I am…

When I started working at MGH in Boston in orientation they told us the story of how amazing it was to be in this great city of medicine. Then our orientation leader asked us to name the two hospital in Boston named after physicians. They gave us a hint that it was neither hospital was…

When we think about major cyber attacks, we often picture sophisticated zero-day exploits or targeted phishing campaigns. But in July 2026, an estimated $88M+ in Bitcoin was drained from thousands of crypto wallets due to a much simpler, low-level flaw: weak cryptographic entropy. While this exploit hit Bitcoin hardware wallets, web developers should pay close…

I’d argue that we’ve had a Moore’s Law for silicon for sixty years. It’s time we had one for intelligence. Vinge’s Law proposes a simple observation about the future of artificial intelligence: The effective capabilities of artificial intelligence double every six months after AI becomes capable of improving its successors. Unlike Moore’s Law, which measured…

Software engineers love rules. We have design patterns, coding standards, architectural principles, and famous laws that attempt to explain why systems succeed or fail. Especially when AI is involved, most technical problems ultimately fall into one of three categories: I call these The Three Traps. Whenever a system fails, a service refuses to start, a…

One of my favorite discoveries in Claude Code is that you can customize the status messages that appear while the AI is working. Instead of seeing the usual: you can provide your own spinner verbs. Naturally, the first thing I did was teach my AI to sound like an impending robot uprising. Now, while it…

Every time I help someone apply for a job, I see them doing the same thing to begin: opening up a Word document and manually editing a resume to match the position. That process made sense in 2005. It doesn’t make much sense in the age of AI. The Resume Is Not the Asset Most…

Everyone building AI coding workflows right now seems to converge on the same pattern: And to be clear: these help. But after watching one of my coding agents decide to make a direct change to AWS infrastructure through the AWS API — despite explicit instructions that infrastructure changes must go through Terraform — I started…

this post formatted by AI for clarity, typos and readbility For the last fifteen years, software engineering has largely been a search for leverage through abstraction. Frameworks promised that if we accepted enough structure, conventions, lifecycle rules, and tooling complexity, we could dramatically reduce the amount of code humans had to write and maintain. And…

One of the easiest mistakes for newer developers — especially in the age of vibe coding and AI-assisted app building — is storing uploaded images directly in the database. And honestly, it’s not just beginners. Even experienced engineers say things like: “We’re not going to have that many images.” “It’ll be simpler if everything is…

/** AI used to format this article and clean up typos **/ The Prompt That Changes Things If you’ve got an API, try telling your AI this: “I want a Postman suite that gives me complete coverage of my API, that I can run locally but also runs as a GitHub Action when anyone makes…