Category: Software Engineering
Building with the GitHub Copilot SDK, Part 7: A UX Design Tool That Actually Keeps Up
Every developer has been there. You have an idea for a layout, maybe a dashboard or a data-heavy form, and you just want to see it. Not tomorrow. Not after you wire up a backend. Right now. But the gap between the picture in your head and something running in a browser always seems to…
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Four New Pathways Graduates
Last week, four more participants finished our latest Pathways Program cohort: Dominic, Jim, Valerie, and Cooper. Each of them came in from different backgrounds. Each of them is leaving as a software engineer. That sentence is easy to write. The work behind it is not. What Pathways Actually Asks of Participants Pathways is a months-long…
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Zero Gravity Prototyping with Google Antigravity
The hardest part of prototyping a new feature isn’t the idea. It’s the wait. You have a product owner with a vision. You have a designer with mockups. And you have a backend that isn’t ready yet. In a traditional workflow, the frontend sits idle until the API exists. That wait kills momentum, and momentum…
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Building with the GitHub Copilot SDK, Part 6 – Styling with CSS Design Tokens and Themes
In my previous post, I pulled Outlook calendar data into Chad’s Copilot and added time-allocation metrics that show how much of your week is already committed. That was about making the app useful. This post is about making it look good. You stare at this thing all day, so it better not just work —…
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Nobody Wants to Do Maintenance
“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” — Kurt Vonnegut Vonnegut wasn’t talking about software. But he could have been. Maintenance has always been the unglamorous part of the job. New features get roadmaps and launch announcements. Fixing that gnarly bug from 2019 gets…
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The Five Stages of Developer Grief
I have talked to a lot of developers over the past two years. Some are excited about AI coding tools. Most are not. A few are outright hostile. When I listen carefully to what they are saying, I hear something familiar. They are grieving. That is not a criticism. Grief is a reasonable response to…
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Building with the GitHub Copilot SDK, Part 5: Pulling Calendar Data from Outlook
In my previous post, I added Mermaid.js diagram generation to the Design tab of Chad’s Copilot. Copilot read the workspace, generated valid diagram syntax from plain-language prompts, and made architecture docs something you’d actually keep up to date. This post is about something different. I wanted to pull in Outlook calendar data and make it…
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Generating Better Test Plans with AI Starts with Better Documentation
AI can help QA teams move faster, but only when it has the right context. When an AI-generated test plan feels too generic, too shallow, or misses obvious risks, the issue usually is not the model; it’s the input. If the only source material is a short ticket or a vague feature summary, the output…
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The Talent Pipeline Flush
Every few months, another headline drops: thousands of employees cut at a major tech company, paired with a statement about “repositioning for AI.” The numbers are staggering. The press releases are polished. And if you only read the headlines, you’d think these companies are shrinking. They’re not. They’re swapping one workforce for another, and the…
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The LLM Is the New Runtime
Last week, I was playing with Pencil, a design tool that lives inside your IDE. You describe what you want, and it generates UI designs on a canvas that compile into clean code. It’s a solid tool. But the thing that caught my attention had nothing to do with design. Pencil doesn’t ship its own…
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