The Application Development Experiences of an Enterprise Engineer
Introduction Tokenization isn't just a billing detail when using Large Language Models (LLMs), it shapes prompt budgets, context limits, and is often a key reason behind a model's surprising behavior. If you're building production systems or wrangling LLMs in real-world code, understanding how tokenization actually works isn't optional, it's engineering hygiene. Ever struggled with a model answer…
I still have the first camera I ever used - a 126 box camera, similar to a Hawekeye II , that was basically a toy even in its own era. I shot with black‑and‑white film because that's what a kid could afford, and it produced the kind of photos you'd expect from a plastic lens and a shutter that felt like it was powered by hope. One of those photos captured Thurman Munson, the Yankees catcher who…
Modern systems increasingly receive free‑text input, either from humans or from language models. These inputs can be ambiguous, incomplete, or phrased in ways the domain layer cannot act on directly. They are not the predictable, schema‑bound shapes that a traditional Anti‑Corruption Layer (ACL) is designed to translate. They require interpretation before any downstream component can reason about…
It is a common misconception that to have an Artificial Intelligence you must have some form of machine learning. This belief has become so pervasive in recent years that many developers and business leaders assume that AI and ML are synonymous terms, or worse, that LLMs are the definition of AI. However, this couldn't be further from the truth. Artificial Intelligence is a broad field that…
After a long pause, I’m excited to share some great news: the Valley of the Sun .NET user groups are officially restarting in 2026 ! As one of the organizers — and one of the speakers for our first event — I couldn’t be more thrilled to help bring our community back together. We’ll be hosting quarterly meetups , alternating between: NWVDNUG (Northwest Valley .NET User Group) SEVDNUG (Southeast…
Recently, I encountered a confusing issue with Visual Studio Code where the source control tab wasn't showing my modified files anymore. Git was correctly detecting changes since the git status command correctly showed modifications, but those changes weren't appearing in VS Code's source control panel. Instead, I was seeing a graph view of my repository history. The Investigation I turned to…
An open letter to Senators Kelly and Gallego urging them to oppose any weakening of the protections found in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996. Dear Senator, I am reaching out to express my strong opposition to any modifications or repeal of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. I am a constituent and a professional with 40 years of experience in distributed…
Every developer has faced it: the temptation to make identifiers "smarter" by embedding information. A customer ID that includes their region, an order number containing the date, a product code that encodes its category - these patterns appear innocent at first, even helpful. But they hide a subtle trap I call the " ID Entanglement Effect " - a cascade of complexity that emerges when identifiers…
TLDR: Code Coverage is the Wrong Target Code coverage metrics HURT code quality , especially when gating deployments, because they are a misleading target, prioritizing superficial benchmarks over meaningful use-case validation. A focus on achieving coverage percentages detracts from real quality assurance, as developers write tests that do what the targets insist that they do, satisfy coverage…
Imagine you're working with a Flight entity within an airline management system. This object exists in at least two (probably more) distinct execution spaces or 'bounded contexts': the 'passenger pre-purchase' context, handled by the sales service, and the 'gate agent' context, managed by the Gate service. In the 'passenger pre-purchase' context, the 'Flight' object might encapsulate attributes…