Engineering Notes
Technical write-ups from real engagements: HIPAA-compliant architecture, serverless AWS infrastructure, payment systems, authentication, databases, and the integrations that hold production systems together. Written for the engineers and founders deciding whether to build it themselves.
Every team runs its own flavor of Scrum — and that's fine. Scrum isn't the end-all. What I learned moving a long-tenured team at Jenzabar from Waterfall to Agile, one small change at a time.
READ ARTICLEA distributed team kept delivering the wrong thing because requirements changed every day. The fix wasn't new developers or more meetings — it was written Jira stories the CEO approved before any code was written, and it got the team delivering again.
READ ARTICLEI inherited a solar-powered RFID station at Duxbury Beach that identified 20% of vehicles and barely lasted a day. The rewrite reached 80% and ran for days — by fixing timing, false reads, a ranger's parked truck, the power budget, a flaky cellular link, and a bug that turned out to be a relay.
READ ARTICLELessons from building nurse scheduling at IntelyCare: staffing rules by nurse type, floor, and building; partial shifts; hour limits; overtime versus offering the shift to someone else; seniority; outside staffing; and moving nurses off paper — when every facility runs differently.
READ ARTICLEMicrosoft 365 Copilot doesn't bypass your security — it exposes years of oversharing. The five things to fix before AI goes live: data governance, identity and access, compliance, production operations, and a real AI readiness checklist.
READ ARTICLEA patient portal is an integration project with a login screen. Authentication, secure messaging, scheduling, and document uploads — plus how to safely pull patient data from HL7 feeds, FHIR APIs, SFTP drops, and vendor APIs through a GraphQL layer, and when to build versus buy.
READ ARTICLEPromoting the person who knows the code best often costs you a great engineer and gets you a frustrated manager. Senior engineers and team leads need different strengths — and software teams need two real career paths: one into management, one into principal engineering.
READ ARTICLEMakerBot discontinued the software, not the printer. Reading the printer's own firmware source, cross-checking three independent reverse-engineering projects, and verifying every call against real hardware is how OpenBot reconstructed the MakerBot Replicator+ protocol and brought the hardware back to life — without shipping a line of MakerBot's own code.
READ ARTICLEThe sprawl critique is right — dozens of repos, duplicated logic, nobody owns the map. But collapsing back to one deployable just trades that for a single point of failure. The fix is a handful of services, not zero and not forty.
READ ARTICLEBefore the next $60,000 hire, ask what the current team actually does all day. Often it's not a staffing problem — it's an integration problem wearing a job description.
READ ARTICLEA spreadsheet or Access database can run a business surprisingly well — until the business depends on it more than the file was ever designed to handle. Where that threshold actually is, and what should replace it.
READ ARTICLEA working demo proves the idea, not that it's safe to run. Why a prototype needs a human who can architect and review what AI never did, before real users and real money touch it.
READ ARTICLESoftware development was never just typing syntax. AI automated the part of the job that made a code-camp grad and a software engineer look interchangeable.
READ ARTICLEWordPress isn't HIPAA compliant out of the box, but it can be made appropriate for the right use case — and when a patient portal has outgrown it entirely.
READ ARTICLEA timed algorithm puzzle measures recall under pressure on an invented problem. Senior engineering is planning and judgment on real ones — a good tool for hiring juniors, the wrong one for hiring seniors.
READ ARTICLEWhy unit tests matter more once an LLM is writing the code — a separate agent should write them, coverage should target risk over raw percentage, and failure paths need testing too.
READ ARTICLEWhy every vendor touching PHI needs a signed BAA, how encryption and PHI/non-PHI separation work in practice, what a breach actually costs, and the trade-offs of leaning on third parties for compliance.
READ ARTICLEWooCommerce checkout needs outbound internet for Stripe and order email — how a second, non-VPC Lambda solves that without paying for a NAT Gateway.
READ ARTICLEHow the Acme Widgets demo storefront gets real full-text product search from SQLite's built-in FTS5 extension instead of an Algolia or Elasticsearch subscription.
READ ARTICLEStrava's free API got paywalled and Garmin's own API can't get past MFA on an unattended schedule — how a delegated-auth relay solved it instead of bypassing 2FA.
READ ARTICLEA real, live storefront compared against Shopify and other hosted platforms on recurring cost and how far you can customize before hitting a wall.
READ ARTICLEA real WordPress install on Lambda with SQLite instead of RDS and no NAT Gateway — how the architecture works and what it actually costs.
READ ARTICLEA decision guide for teams comparing custom software with SaaS tools, spreadsheets, and one-off integrations.
READ ARTICLEExamples of practical automation projects that reduce admin time, improve follow-up, and make existing systems work together.
READ ARTICLEHow custom integrations connect Shopify, hosted storefronts, supplier feeds, fulfillment updates, and tracking to reduce manual work and costly errors.
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