On building software and the decisions behind it
In August 2022, before I was using AI this way, I wrote: “Computers do what we tell them to. We’re just not always clear with what we’re asking for.”
Building with AI has only made that more obvious.
In fact, it made something else clear too: even when we think we are being clear, there is still a lot of room for a system to interpret the request in ways that are technically valid and product-wise wrong.… Read more
Most document systems are built for storage and extraction.
That is the wrong goal.
In high-trust environments, the real job is not to collect documents or parse fields. It is to determine whether the available evidence actually supports a claim.
That is a different system.
Organizations generate endless documentation: invoices, contracts, certifications, logs, reports, statements, attestations.… Read more
As systems scale, so do dependencies. The question is not whether they exist. It is whether teams know how to work through them.
I’ve seen teams say they’re blocked by dependencies when they’re actually blocked by something else: nobody wants to move until the boundary is finished.
That is a costly mistake.… Read more
Scheduled financial transfers sound simple. A customer creates an instruction — for example, “transfer $100 every week” — and the system processes the transaction on the appropriate day.
Many systems begin with a straightforward implementation. A daily job reads instructions from a database, generates transactions, and attempts to process them. For a small system this can work well enough.… Read more
Computers do what we tell them to. We’re just not always clear with what we’re asking for.… Read more
Note (2026): This was written while I was actively working with Vault. My current stack leans more toward AWS-native solutions (KMS, Secrets Manager, IAM), but the core concepts here—separating secrets from code and treating encryption as a service—still apply.
In my last post, I discussed using the Spring Encryption project to encrypt sensitive data in our application.… Read more
One thing that’s been nagging me as we build out our framework is how we’re handling JWTs. Right now, we’re doing what most applications do. The token comes back after authentication and gets sent on every request in the header:
GET http://localhost:8080/someprotectedendpoint
Authorization: Bearer <jwt token>This works exactly as expected.… Read more
Recently I started playing around more with my Neo Smartpen. The company makes their data storage format public and I wondered how long it would take me to write a program to show my handwritten pages within a simple app.
Given my background, I knew I could do this quickly in Java with a UI in Swing so I started there.… Read more
After writing custom code to handle signing up users, sending emails, supporting multi-factor authentication, I looked more into alternatives. Why? As a startup you have to be scrappy. Use what’s free, create solutions for platform parts that cost too much for where you’re at. Eventually, you will grow out of this and will need to look at alternatives.… Read more
It’s been a while since I’ve written a post. I’ve been heads down working on the platform thinking more about use cases, revising code and introducing a basic React client. If I haven’t mentioned already, I love IntelliJ. It’s my tool of choice and have been using it for years. Every time they make a release they introduce something cool that is helpful.… Read more