Category: Software Engineering
Building a Really Snappy Offline-First Flow with TanStack Query
A common issue with modern software is the network call. This can be a problem in two ways. First, these calls can be slow, creating a mediocre user experience. The second problem is that these calls can fail when we are having network problems. So I thought, can we run our UI off an offline…
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How to Spot Bad Code (Even If You Don’t Write Any)
You don’t need to know a programming language to tell when code is in rough shape. A lot of “bad code” looks bad in ways anyone can see — the same way you can tell a kitchen is messy without being a chef. You might encounter this more often than you expect. A vendor submits…
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Deploying Containers to Azure App Services
I’ve been running a project on an Azure App Service for a while now, and I’ve landed on a setup I’m pretty happy with: a single Docker container that bundles the Angular frontend, NestJS API, and Caddy as the web server. The whole thing builds in GitHub Actions, pushes to Azure Container Registry (ACR), and…
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It’s Just Config
Friday, 4:47 PM. An engineer opens a pull request on a billing service. One file changed. One line changed. The reviewer is already in their coat. “LGTM — it’s just config.” The PR merges at 4:58. By Monday morning, the team will have charged 3,800 customers two to four times each, refunded $2.3 million, and…
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The Interface Is Dissolving
For twenty years, the job was the same. A person points, clicks, types, and navigates to a result, and we design every step of that path. Software waits. The human is the engine. Agents break that. When software can understand what you want and act on its own to get there, the interface stops being…
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Quality Isn’t Tested In, It’s Layered In
We once delivered a project in six weeks. It felt fast. The demo landed, the client was happy, and we walked out of the room feeling like heroes. Then we spent the next six weeks stabilizing it. I think about that project a lot, because it taught me something that no estimate ever shows you:…
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GitHub Squad: Your AI Dev Team Living Inside the Repo
We are rapidly moving to a world where multiple agents are the default pattern for many tasks. Each agent has its own agenda, expertise, and perspective — and together they collaborate to solve complex problems faster and more reliably than a single model ever could. Why not just stuff everything into a bigger context window…
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Tokens Are the Unit
Disclaimer: What follows was true as of 6/3/2026. Considering the speed at which the AI space is moving, the dollars referenced below will change. “What’s this going to cost per month?” Now that I sit in the CTO seat, I understand why that answer matters. It is not a curiosity question. It is a staffing,…
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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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