Engineering Craft

The posts here are about judgment rather than technique — the part of the job that does not fit in a runbook.

Why every software engineer should learn how to draw is the one people push back on most. The argument is not that drawing makes you a better programmer by osmosis; it is that deliberately practising a skill where you are visibly bad at it rebuilds a tolerance for being a beginner, and that tolerance is what resourcefulness is made of. I also take apart the NASA creativity study that everyone cites and nobody reads.

Agentic development asks what is left of the craft when a model writes the first draft, and how the tech industry amplifies social stigmas with machine learning is the ethical floor I think the field owes its users. Resilience engineering belongs here as much as it belongs under reliability: designing for failure is a posture before it is an architecture.

I am self-taught, with no degree past a high school diploma, which is probably why I keep returning to this. Nobody handed me a curriculum, so I have opinions about what actually taught me anything.

5 posts

2025 How My 7-Year-Old Son Vibe Coded His Halloween Costume Two weeks to build an ESP32 LED robot mask — 242 WS2812B LEDs, a 3D-printed see-through mesh, and a 7-year-old deciding what the faces should look like.

2025 Agentic Development: Navigating the AI Revolution in Software Development Exploring the rise of AI-powered development tools and their impact on software engineering, from GitHub Copilot to local LLMs. A deep dive into "vibe coding," agentic development, and how these tools reshape our workflows while examining opportunities and challenges.

2024 Embrace Disruption: How Resilience Engineering Makes Your Systems Stronger Discover how resilience engineering, including chaos engineering and FMEA, strengthens systems, turning disruptions into opportunities for growth and adaptability.