Field Notes

Notes from the field, or whatever you call spending years in software engineering, building things, breaking things, and occasionally figuring out why. Some are technical, some are opinionated, most are written for whoever ends up Googling the same question at 2am.


Designing for Scale: Field Notes From Building Enterprise Systems

What I've picked up over years of building systems, borrowed from engineers I've worked with and software engineering materials I've read.

7 min read   ·   2026

Skill Files, Not Code: How I Built a Human-in-the-Loop Workflow for My AI Coding Agent

I let an AI agent build a simple utility tool, and ended up learning more about managing it than about the code itself. Turns out skill files can carry a whole workflow: plan, approve, execute, verify, rollback. Some parts of that workflow were broken until I actually checked. Here's what I found.

8 min read   ·   2026

Lessons in Pivoting: How My Personal Reference Became a Reusable Blueprint

I wanted something past another toy demo or an over-engineered setup nobody would actually use. Here's how a personal reference project turned into a reusable microservice blueprint, plus a few lessons I didn't see coming.

5 min read   ·   2026