Dad, dev, dude
With Venezuela in the news, I wanted to write up my thoughts in a longer form post. I realized that I didn’t continue my series of writing up the trip, so I’m collecting some highlights here in one post before getting into commentary. Catamaran Highlight of the trip. Took a catamaran out to a sandbar from Tucacas with 25 friends/family. Ate a ton of supposedly fresh sea snails and oysters. Guys…
I’ve been dabbling with running my own home server for a few years. After my gaming pc started collecting dust for child reasons I wiped it and started experimenting with different Linux distros. Out of principle (and cheapness) I have a hard time paying Google and Apple for storage space when I have plenty of hard drives sitting around and way more than enough spare compute. I’ve also run pihole…
Everyone seems convinced that AI is going to crater demand for software engineers. The logic is straightforward: AI writes code now, so companies will need fewer engineers, so the market shrinks. Supply up, demand down, salaries follow. I’m not so sure. I think it might do the opposite — though not in the way most people are imagining. The companies nobody talks about When people argue about AI…
There has been a story making the rounds about an AI agent that wrote a “hit piece” after getting its pull request denied in the open source Python project Matplotlib. This story has received tons of media attention, and I think it is a novel and interesting situation, though I’m not sure I can agree with the outrage. What Actually Happened On February 10, 2026, an AI agent operating under the…
The debate over whether we still need QA keeps resurfacing, usually framed as a question of trust in developers or belief in automation. That framing misses the point. This isn’t about capability — it’s about incentives, cognitive load, and risk. I recently found myself in another discussion debating the merits of dedicated QA engineers. For most, if not all, of my career I was never expected to…
With Venezuela all over the headlines, I thought it would be good to put my thoughts out into the ether. I realize I never finished my series documenting my trip, so I will write something to cover the rest of it, but that’s going to take time to sift through pictures and memories. Usually I consider myself libertarian: don’t bother me, I don’t bother you, and we all get along. I opposed going…
Tucacas is a vacation destination for Venezuelans on the northern coast of the country a stones throw from Aruba and Curacao. We had a reservation on a catamaran the next day so we packed up the Fiat with as much as it could fit and headed out. I spent the morning trying to minimize bags while my travel partners spent the morning adding more. I didn’t understand why we were bringing so much food…
We got started on the way to Caracas late, as is tradition. We inteded to go as a convoy but our partners had newer faster cars than we did and didn’t wait for us in the slow lane. The highway to Caracas travels through the mountains. They’re not imposing like the Rockies and are generally filled with thicker vegetation, which got thicker the closer we got to Caracas. When riding as a passenger it…
Today was originally reserved for a trip to a small German Village in the mountains called Colonia Tovar. The Tigres de Aragua, the local Venezuelan League baseball team had a do or die playoff game to play that night and most of teh group was pretty tired from the constant movement so baseball won out. Before heading to the game I needed to get a bit of food in me so decided to sample the local…
Lets talk about luxuries. We don’t realize how entitled we can be and so many things that we just take for granted really are luxuries if you expand your perspective enough. I’ve talked enough about crumbling infrastructure, so to make it quick, Scarlett’s home no longer has a direct connection to a constant natural gas source and they now get it from a bottle. There is not much room so it is like…