Enterprise software, AI integrations, and cloud architecture — from the field.
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.
MakerBot 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.
The 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.
Before 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.
A 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.
A 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.
Software 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.
WordPress 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.
A 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.
Why 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.
Why 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.
How 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.
Strava'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.
How custom integrations connect Shopify, hosted storefronts, supplier feeds,
fulfillment updates, and tracking to reduce manual work and costly errors.