Watch, Read, Listen
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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…
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Recently I felt some poor performance on my Windows laptop workstation. WizTree reported that my largest file was: Nearly 150 GB. The obvious conclusion was: “I must have enormous projects.” I was wrong. Step 1: Finding the VHD PowerShell quickly identified the culprit: Output: At this point I considered deleting WSL entirely. After all, most…
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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…
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2026 US Open DFS Analysis 2026 US Open DFS Analysis Generated: 2026-06-17 1. Goal Recap Build the optimal 6-player DraftKings Classic Golf DFS lineup for the 2026 US Open at Shinnecock Hills. Salary cap: $50,000. Scoring rewards birdies (+3), eagles (+8), bogey-free rounds (+3 bonus), and finish-position bonuses (1st = +30 pts). Objective: maximize expected…
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Had a simple but annoying task today: take a massive block of text (no spaces) and split it into 5-character chunks. You’d think AI could handle this easily, right? Wrong. Ask ChatGPT or Claude to manually split a long string into 5-character blocks and watch it hallucinate, drop characters, or just give up halfway through.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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/** 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…