For the past year, I’ve been leading the development of Maglev, a complete rewrite of the OneBusAway server. The original system was built in Java over a decade ago, and while it still works, it’s showing its age. Maglev is a greenfield project in...
Once, I was leading engineering on a product caught in multiple overlapping crises. Our biggest customer was breaking the database simply through their size and usage patterns. Other customers threatened to churn unless we could provide new featur...
I worked on a project once where leadership celebrated every feature shipped, every deadline met, every sprint completed on schedule. The team was moving fast. Blazingly fast, by some measures. Every standup had good news. Every demo impressed sta...
The Swift team just announced nightly builds of the Swift SDK for Android, complete with Java interoperability and a getting started guide. They’re pitching it as “opening new avenues for cross-platform development.” It won’t work. Not because the...
I spent the last few evenings polishing the trip planner feature that an intern built for the OneBusAway iOS app. Not reviewing the code, not providing architectural guidance, but actually writing Swift to handle edge cases in the UI and fixing la...
The most valuable code I’ve written in the past six months is code I fully intend to throw away. This isn’t some zen programming philosophy or agile methodology talking point. It’s the practical reality of using Claude Code to build prototypes and...
In the late 1990s, companies like Global Crossing spent tens of billions building fiber-optic networks that would supposedly revolutionize telecommunications. The infrastructure was real, the technology transformative, but the economics never work...
Looking back on iRooster, my first commercial Mac OS X application from 2003, fills me with nostalgia and gratitude. What started as a desperate solution to oversleeping through morning classes became a formative experience that shaped my entire...
There’s a revolution brewing in enterprise software development, and it’s happening in the least expected place: line of business (LOB) applications. You know, those unglamorous internal tools that run payroll, track inventory, manage customer rec...
Upgraded to Rails 8 and swapped out Sprockets for the shiny new Propshaft gem? Great choice. Got a lot of assets? You might be in for a nasty surprise. I recently migrated a Rails app with what I thought was a relatively small number of JS and CS...