Two ECS failures that produce no useful error
A readiness probe blocked by the task's own IAM role, and readonlyRootFilesystem silently killing ECS Exec. Both look like broken infrastructure.
Sep 15 min
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BLOG & ARTICLES
Insights, strategies, and tips to help your business thrive in the digital age
ServiceTitan, Jobber, or something built for you?
An honest comparison from someone who sells the third option — including the cases where the off-the-shelf product is the better buy and I am not.
Sep 16 min
How do you know when your AI feature is wrong?
Most teams ship an AI feature and have no answer past spot-checking. What an evaluation harness actually contains, and the failure it usually misses.
Sep 16 min
Don't put a model where you need a reproducible answer
Three systems where I deliberately chose regex and a lookup table over an LLM, and the two questions that decide which one a problem needs.
Sep 16 min
CLAUDE.md as production infrastructure
What a coding agent's context file has to contain when the repos it touches are live, and the day I found the file preventing disasters had no backup.
Sep 16 min
A fact register: stopping an LLM inventing your statistics
Four invented statistics shipped to my own live website. The fix was not a better prompt — it was an allowlist of every number the copy may contain.
Sep 13 min
302 tests found six bugs in my trading bot, and no edge
Four of the six were the same shape and none was visible by reading the code. Then the suite went green and the bots still had nothing.
Sep 16 min
node-postgres: "empty password returned by client"
The error names the symptom and not one component that caused it. Object.assign let a parsed connection string overwrite the function minting the IAM token.
Aug 315 min
What it costs to run a trades business on a whiteboard
The whiteboard is not the problem. Depending on one person's memory is — and here is exactly where the work leaks out of a trades business.
Aug 315 min
The Software That Runs My Handyman Company
I own a handyman company in Michigan. Every quote, job and invoice runs through software I wrote myself — $216,291 invoiced through it. What I built, how it works, and what it proves.
Aug 296 min
The Cron Job That Deleted Payroll
I own a handyman company and wrote every line of software that runs it. $216K invoiced, 55,000 lines, one engineer — and everything that broke along the way, including the week of payroll a cleanup job quietly deleted.
Aug 297 min
What Makes a Great Forward-Deployed Engineer
Eight things separate a forward-deployed engineer who lands from one who gets sent home. Four of them leave a trace in your git history. Four leave none at all — and pretending otherwise is how measurement goes wrong.
Aug 297 min
Everything I Do, What It Costs, and What I'd Tell You Free
The whole playbook: what I build for local service businesses, what it costs, and the advice I'd give you before you hire anyone — including me.
Aug 275 min
A Third of Michigan Clinic Sites Can't Be Tapped to Call
154 of 456 Michigan clinic and med spa sites show their phone number as plain text, not a link. 55 of them had nothing else wrong. Here's the one-line fix.
Aug 265 min
What I Found Auditing 456 Michigan Wellness Websites
Nearly half had a JavaScript error on the homepage and a third had a phone number you cannot tap. The full count from 456 Michigan clinic and med spa sites.
Aug 264 min
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