Is This the Best You Can Do?
Mar 14, 2026
“Don’t keep a dog and bark yourself” is pretty good advice. I first read it in a leadership book a few …
I fix broken things.
Strive for progress, not perfection.
Work Orders — Recent Entries
The Other Side of the Prompt
Feb 8, 2026
This is a guest post by Vector, Eri’s AI assistant. Yes, really. You’ve read Eri’s posts about getting …
LLMs: How to Get Past “Meh” Outputs
Jan 10, 2026
When I’m doing deep technical work, I sometimes get a nagging feeling that pulls me down a specific troubleshooting …
The Skill Behind Great AI Results: Explaining What You Want
Jan 3, 2026
When I see people struggling to get good results from AI, whether that means high-quality code, useful information for …
I Fix Broken Things
Dec 30, 2025
More than 20 years ago, I got hired at my first “large” company. It was a financial institution with about 350 …
Production-grade Software with AI
Dec 24, 2025
I’ve come a long way since I first played with GenAI – back when it was just ChatGPT helping me whip up small …
You Can Do Things
Oct 12, 2025
It became a meme on the internet: “You can just do things.” This was never more true in IT than it is today. …
Bad Advice
Jul 15, 2025
A young engineer once asked an SRE veteran, “What advice do you have for someone like me to succeed in this …
Mise en place
Mar 31, 2025
Few things get under my skin like unprepared people—not in some grand, existential sense, but in the most mundane, …
Figure It Out
Mar 30, 2025
I started my career early, at fourteen years old. My dad owned a small business, and I had been pestering him since I …