Reflections

This is the story of how I overengineered a software project because I made the wrong assumptions too early. This was originally going to be a success story of how I managed to rescue my friend’s website from his web developer who was keeping it hostage. I was going to write about how I used AI to rewrite a whole website in a day, despite me not being a web developer. In the end, I realised I could have done this in 20 minutes, rather than taking a full day. ...

Reflecting back to the time I was deciding whether to start my own blog site has made me remember that it wasn’t an easy decisions. Now I’ve been writting blogs for several years, and I rarely care about whether I’m an expert or a novice in the subject that I’m writing about. But this wasn’t always the case. I used to be really worried that I would write about something and people would call me out for not being right, and this thought was scary. Starting to write publicly was not an easy step to take, and there’s probably a lot of people out there who probably feel the same as I did, so I wanted to write this to hopefully encourage everyone out there to start writing. ...

Over the past few months I’ve been using AI agents a lot to automate many engineering tasks that otherwise would take me much longer to do. I’m a firm believer that the era of writing code by hand has finished. With the right workflows these tools can do a lot of the work for us. AI is improving our productivity, and it will continue more and more as the tools mature. ...

This has been one of the years where I’ve learned the most things, probably since I first started learning programming almost 10 years ago. I thought it would be a great exercise to put it into writing to reflect on it all. The Dvorak keyboard layout The first thing I set out to learn in 2025 was how to type using the Dvorak keyboard layout. The main reason was simply because it sounded like a fun thing to do. I still remember how much fun it was to learn QWERTY in school, going through all of those timed exercises. This time around it wasn’t as fun, and to be honest, it was very frustrating at times, especially when my brain completely forgot how to QWERTY and I was stuck typing Dvorak full time at very low speeds. ...

Today I wanted to write about something that happens to me at work all the time: the process of asking for technical help, helps me discover the answer to my question. For example, today I was stuck on some terraform config that wasn’t showing some of the changes I was expecting to see in the diff. I decided to start writing a message in a support channel. As I was writing the message I started thinking about whether I had covered all the bases of things that I could check on before bothering someone to help me on something I could have done myself. At that point, it occured to me that I hadn’t checked a specific file that might have some releveant information. So, I deleted my half typed message, checked the file, and voila! The reason my config wasn’t applying was because I forgot to explicitly add some variables. ...

Interviewing for other jobs in tech can make you a more competent engineer. My premise for this argument is that when you prepare an interview for a new role you need to prepare to answer questions, technical and non-technical, in a domain that is different from your day to day work. This forces you to step out of your daily work and read and think about different domains and technologies. During the interview process you will get an idea of how well you performed, whether that is via self reflection, or feedback from the emloyer. This gives you a pretty good idea of where you are lacking knowledge and a good direction of where to focus next. ...