The False Promise of ORMs
ORMs promise to abstract databases and SQL. At any normal scale, this promise fails and the ORM becomes a powerful multiplier of pointless complexity
Mike Pray
A blog
Latest posts
Thoughts on my semi-annual blog rewrite
Every few years I rewrite my blog and rehost it on a different platform. Each time I learn a lot (and usually don't write many actual blog posts).
Coding Isn't the Hard Part
With the rise of AI coding tools like Cursor, people are worried about the end of the Junior Engineer role, but coding isn't entirely what makes developers useful
How I wrote a stateless gift link feature
The tradeoffs of stateful and stateless approaches to building a gift link feature for a content website
How I think about datetime in systems engineering
Time is relative to location!
Street photography
Some street photography
My Monaco F1 Theory of Product Development
My unsolicited and probably incorrect opinions about AI and LLMs. You might not bother to read it, but at least I bothered to write it, which is more than you can say about anything created with an LLM!
When Blame is Good
Blame is good, but only when it follows organizational accountability
Setting up a Jira Webhook with nginx, Digital Ocean, and Express
How you can set up an Express webhook integrating Jira to take actions on Jira issue status changes
Agile vs Waterfall (and what Agile really tries to solve for)
Waterfall works sometimes, and sometimes Agile doesn't. What's really going on?