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Anthropic models do not support the video modality as input, but through skills you can give it the ability to see using other models

Mark Zuckerberg was right 2025 brought us mid life engineer level work via AI coding tools.

Following up on my 2025 workflows, this post explores the shift from manual prompting to agentic feedback loops. I break down why model choice now outweighs prompt engineering, how Claude Code has become my primary driver alongside Cursor, and why the "SWE II" level of AI requires a new focus on automated eval loops and organizational standards.

Following up on my 2025 workflows, this post explores the shift from manual prompting to agentic feedback loops. I break down why model choice now outweighs prompt engineering, how Claude Code has become my primary driver alongside Cursor, and why the "SWE II" level of AI requires a new focus on automated eval loops and organizational standards.

Pros and cons lists break down quickly in complex engineering decisions. Decision matrices create alignment, make tradeoffs explicit, and lead to clearer system designs.

As a staff engineer at an early-stage startup, I rely on LLM-powered coding assistants like Cursor, Claude, and ChatGPT to move faster while writing less code by hand. This post shares practical workflows, prompting strategies, and principles for using AI tools effectively in real-world software engineering.

Don't be afraid to utilize side projects to accelerate your career growth. This post explores how building personal projects can enhance your skills, accelerate onboarding, and keep you competitive in a fast-evolving industry. Side projects are a low-pressure environment to explore and learn about emerging technologies, to accelerate your future work and career growth.

Track you anxiety and depression risk with widely accepted screening and diagnostic tools

In this post, I share how my team spent two years building an internal developer portal, only to discover it wasn’t solving our developers’ real pain points. By implementing a developer survey, we uncovered the true challenges our developers were facing and pivoted our focus to deliver tools that made a meaningful impact. Learn how understanding developer priorities can help your team avoid building the wrong tools and drive real productivity improvements.

Join me as I share my journey through four and a half transformative years at Brex, the fintech powerhouse that evolved from a unicorn to a decacorn. In this article, I delve into 16 key learnings from my time as a software engineer and engineering manager. From navigating massive organizational growth and re-organizations to driving product innovations and enhancing developer productivity, these insights encapsulate the challenges and triumphs I've experienced while working in a rapidly scaling tech company.

In this blog post, we explore the art of seeking help as a software engineer, emphasizing the significance of providing context and prerequisites to ensure clear and actionable responses. By structuring inquiries with relevant details like issue descriptions, code snippets, and error logs, engineers can obtain quicker and more accurate solutions. Whether seeking assistance internally within a company or externally in developer communities and open-source projects, these skills foster a positive, supportive, and successful community. Mastering this art empowers engineers to make meaningful progress in their projects while contributing to a thriving knowledge-sharing community.

+1 on retool, my company uses retool extensively to build out admin tools for our operations and CX teams. It's incredibly straightforward and easy to hook it up directly to DB's for reading, as well as other query/requests.

Coming from building admin tools in ruby on rails previously, this is incredibly easy and straightforward. If I have the money to pay for retool I don't think I would choose another tool in the future

It's even possible to host it yourself which allows highly regulated industries to use it.

Last year I started a new job at Brex where Elixir is the primary programming language for business logic. This was my first real adventure into Elixir after working in Ruby (mostly) for my professional career. Since José Valim came from the Ruby world, Elixir was a common buzzword I heard for years. I had done a tutorial or two here and there but never gotten to really use it. Now, looking back at the past year I’ve become fairly comfortable with Elixir, and wanted to outline some of the things I really enjoy about Elixir and some of the things I miss from Ruby.

Brex is re-imagining B2B financial products, starting with a corporate card for technology companies. Here, we’ll provide a glimpse into the card processing infrastructure as well as the underlying financial technology that powers Brex cards.

Back in school, teachers and TAs made commenting your code seem like a necessity that everyone constantly does as a software engineer. Without comments, you shouldn't consider your code complete. However, since working in industry I find it much different in practice. This post outlines my own observations on when software engineers actually comment their code and when it's important.

I'm actually not so sure that there terms of services prohibits scraping for personal use (or scraping at all) but maybe my understanding is incorrect. I have read through them here https://www.zillow.com/corp/Terms.htm and looked through there robots.txt here https://streeteasy.com/robots.txt. This is most likely because they use Distil Networks and rely on them to block web scrapers. But you are right this is something of concern and I can add a section talking about the dangers of breaking a sites terms and conditions and how scraping must be done correctly even for personal use

no talk of falcon? https://www.falcon-net.org/