Posts
Stay awhile and listen...
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Whelp
Well, this is not the follow-up post I wanted to write.
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Why I'm Testing OpenCode + GPT-5.3 Codex
For the last year my LLM of choice has been Claude Code heavily. The built-in subagent functionality is a huge part of why I prefer it. Being able to spin up a few focused personas to help with planning, critique, and implementation is the thing that made it feel like...
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I'm Joining Webflow
Oh hey, who was two thumbs and isn’t unemployed anymore? I’ve accepted an offer to join Webflow as a Senior IT Systems Engineer, Collaboration Technology. I start on 2/2.
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Anyone Remember Watson?
OpenAI and Anthropic both made healthcare announcements this month, which means it is time for everyone to have a very normal and measured conversation about AI and medicine.
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Local Life Management (LLM? Get It?)
Earlier this month I wrote about setting up a Meta-Repo for managing my side projects, and last week I wrote about how I was experimenting with using it to manage my life, not just my side projects. Since a handful of people reached out asking to see the code, I’ve...
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Atlassian's 2025 Recap: AI, Cloud, and the End of Data Center
If 2024 was the year Atlassian announced that AI was going to be a huge part of its future, 2025 was the year they tried to make that future feel unavoidable.
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Automating the Implement Loop
If you’ve been following along, you know I’ve been on a bit of a journey with AI-assisted coding. It started with pure vibe coding (disaster), evolved into a structured template, and eventually became the AI Toolkit with specs, phases, and code reviews. I even started applying the same ideas to...
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I'm Letting Claude Manage My Life (Sort Of)
Update: Since a handful of people reached out and asked, I’ve put the framework I’m using on GitHub. You can find it here: Local Life Manager. That repo is no longer under active development.
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A Meta-Repo Workflow
Update: My Claude Plugin has been deprecated. I’ve moved on to using Codex inside of OpenCode for now, but I am sure that will change again. Most of the concepts here still apply. I am still working out of a top-level repo that contains all of my active projects as...
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How I Approach My Job: The Tool Is the Easy Part
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about what a Solutions Engineer actually does. I talked about how the job is really about translating fuzzy business wants into concrete technical solutions. But I didn’t really get into how I actually do that.
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Three Lessons from Building an AI Coding Toolkit
Update: This has been deprecated. I’ve moved on to using Codex inside of OpenCode for now, but I am sure that will change again.
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What is a Solutions Engineer?
I’m job hunting for the first time in almost a decade, and I’m stuck on a surprisingly hard question: what job title should I actually search for? I’ve been a “Senior Atlassian Engineer” and a “Staff Application Engineer,” but the work I’m best at is architecting solutions. Translating fuzzy business...
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Spaces? Projects? Does It Even Matter?
Atlassian just announced something that I have low-key wanted them to do for a while. Jira “Projects” are being renamed to “Spaces.”
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I Made an AI Coding Template (Sort of)
Update: After releasing this, Anthropic added Claude Code Plugins, which turned out to be a much better way to distribute this.
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Atlassian Is Finally Sunsetting Jira Data Center
It finally happened. Last week Atlassian officially announced the end of life for Jira Data Center. We all knew this was coming, despite Atlassian repeatedly saying it would keep supporting Data Center.
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I Tried Using AI to Make Me an AI App
Well, it’s been a while since my last post. I bought a trailer, spent some time fixing it up, took it out in the woods, and now I am up in Alaska visiting family. I just spent a long weekend hiking around Denali National Park. But I’ve also been working...
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I Watched All of Atlassian Team 25 So You Don't Have to (Part 2)
Following up on Part 1 (which covered the three keynotes), here are my stream-of-consciousness bullet points for the Super Sessions. Like before, very little has been done to clean them up or format them.
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Is ChatGPT the Perfect Study Buddy?
The Good and the Bad of Online Learning
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I Watched All of Atlassian Team 25 So You Don't Have to (Part 1)
I realize I’m a little late to the party with this. I did watch the keynotes live, but didn’t have a chance to go back and watch everything else until this week. Being unemployed is surprisingly time-consuming.
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Not Prepared
Yesterday, the Pittsburgh area was hit by a particularly nasty storm. Trees blew over, roofs were ripped off buildings, thunder…thundered. And then the power went out. I’ve always liked to think that I’m a resourceful guy. That I’d do fine in a hypothetical zombie apocalypse: cooking over a campfire, rationing...
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What's Next
Well, it feels like the end of an era. After five and a half years at Aurora, I’m moving on. I joined when Aurora was still a two-year-old startup, about 500 people working out of a much smaller office. Now they have almost 2,000 employees and are on the brink...
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Atlassian’s FedRAMP Certification: What’s the Big Deal?
Atlassian announced in early 2025 that Atlassian Government Cloud achieved FedRAMP Moderate authorization. That is a pretty big deal if you work in or around the public sector, because it means Jira Software, Confluence, and Jira Service Management are now much easier to justify for U.S. federal agencies and contractors...
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A Mental Health Chatbot for High School Students
I know my last post about AI was a bit of a bummer, but it’s not like I think it’s all bad. I was reading TechCrunch and came across a story about a startup called Sonar Mental Health that’s built an AI chatbot named Sonny to help students with mental...
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You Should Be Using an RSS Reader
Is your internet browsing experience… unpleasant? Ads? Clickbait? Constantly trying to find the quality stuff among all the low-effort garbage? Important updates getting buried by The Algorithm? Spending hours checking all your different bookmarks? There is a tool from the ’90s that can solve (almost) all of this.
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It's Never Too Late
Hey there fellow nerds. This post is a little different. I wanted to talk about something that’s always mattered to me, maybe too much: self-improvement. I’ve spent years chasing it while wrestling with untreated ADHD, usually to mixed success.
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Am I the Only One Who Watched Terminator?
AI is getting the nukes now. Cool, cool, cool. Google quietly deleted a key section from its AI Principles, the pledge against developing AI for weapons or surveillance tech.
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Have Yinz Been Following the DeepSeek News?
So, basically out of nowhere, a relatively unknown Chinese AI company called DeepSeek showed up and kicked off the most chaotic AI news cycle we’ve seen since ChatGPT first went viral. Something something may you live in interesting times?
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Atlassian’s Big Year: 2024 Highlights and Announcements
So, Atlassian had a pretty big 2024. The headline was Rovo, a potentially very powerful AI assistant, but they also announced everything from the Jira unification to a big-ticket partnership with Williams Racing, something that seemed to come completely out of left field (at least to someone who doesn’t know...
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Hello World
What an original title for the first post of a tech…ish blog, huh?
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