Curiosity and Craft Exercising those muscles of grit and resiliency that are essential to improving at our craft I’ve been thinking about what drives me to build things. It is curiosity and craftsmanship. Those two things have been consistent throughout my career and life - from LabView as a Physics undergrad, to many different languages and technologies, to Rails web applications, to data pipelines to now LLM-based architectures. Even golf on the driving range as a kid, tinkering with clubs, swing changes. Trying to constantly improve and understand the fundamentals, and then put them to test. ...

Be adventurous and free - start hosting this stuff yourself with no barriers to your exploration! The $17/Month Death by a Thousand Cuts I love building side projects. I tend to use them to explore technologies in a fun way - Fantasy golf leagues, personal dashboards - the kind of apps that scratch a specific itch but don’t need to scale to millions of users. But every time I’d spin up a new Rails app, I’d hit the same wall: hosting costs that kill exploration. ...

When we think about the people we admire most, their stories often reveal the core values that matter to us, and we can see common threads that shine a light what principled success really looks like. David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH): The Power of Opinionated Pragmatism David Heinemeier Hansson: Balancing code, racing, and life with principled pragmatism DHH didn’t just create Ruby on Rails—he carved out an entire philosophy around software development and life balance. What strikes me most about him isn’t just technical and practical brilliance, but his unwavering commitment to principled pragmatism. ...

A Sherlock Holmes gopher analyzing blog traffic When setting up analytics for this blog, I connected Google Analytics 4 (GA4) with Google Search Console through a simple site verification tag. Here’s what this integration actually provides and why it’s worth the extra configuration step. The Setup The connection requires adding a site verification meta tag to your Hugo config: ...

[Generated with Leonardo.ai using prompt: “A whimsical cartoon illustration in classic cartoon style showing a determined Gopher sitting in a cozy computer chair …”] Why I Built This Blog After years of keeping technical notes scattered across various platforms, I wanted a single place to document my journey as a software architect, share what I’m learning about data pipelines and recently about AI integration, and connect with others navigating similar technical challenges. ...

Why This Matters: The Shift to Agentic AI The software landscape is shifting toward agentic AI systems - applications where Large Language Models (LLMs) don’t just answer questions, but actively use tools to solve complex problems. Instead of building separate AI features, the market and industry are moving toward AI that can directly interact with your existing systems, databases, and workflows. ...

Data Pipelines and Possibilities! I’m a Software and Data Architect focused on building resilient, agent-driven data platforms and data pipelines. After two decades of building software systems, I’ve learned that the best architectures are like good stories - they have a clear structure, handle complexity gracefully, and actually solve real problems. I spend my days designing data pipelines, distributed systems, and backend architectures that scale. Here I share insights from the trenches of software engineering, lessons learned from career transitions, and discoveries about building both systems and life intentionally. ...