41 articles from the engineers and strategists doing the work.
May 18, 2026
There’s a narrative taking hold right now that goes something like this: AI can write all the code, you don’t need as many developers, and the ones you do keep just need to be fast with a prompt. Fire your senior engineers. Hire a junior and an AI subscription. Ship ten times faster at a fraction of the cost.
Nov 21, 2025
Everyone in the world knows that a picture is worth a million words…but what about an animation? Maybe ten million words? Maybe more.
Nov 14, 2025
It All Goes So Well… Until It Doesn’t Every software development project starts as an exciting event for everyone involved. Your client is excited that their vision is becoming a reality. You're excited about new code to write, new problems to solve, and new techniques to try. So why is it that when you show your work or present a direction, those good feelings can just … evaporate?
Oct 16, 2025
Oftentimes when building mobile apps, we want to front load data to avoid loading time in between each section of the app. Today, we will look at building a simple singleton cache in Flutter, and how using it can create a better user experience.
Sep 30, 2025
It’s pretty easy to have an idea. It’s not so easy to have a good idea, a little harder to communicate that fledgling idea to other people, and even more difficult to expand it into a project or product with a whole team of people. Collaborators misunderstand the purpose, ask questions that uncover new possibilities (or new problems), and bring fresh ideas that—even if they’re brilliant—can add complexity and uncertainty.
Aug 29, 2025
Dear Dev, One essay recommended to me early on in my career was “Object Calisthenics” (OC) and since that time I recommend it to every developer I cross paths with. “Object Calisthenics” describes a set of 9 rules credited to Jeff Bays in the book The ThoughtWork Anthology. The goal of these rules is to empower a developer to write cleaner, more maintainable code.There is a lot of value in being familiar with the OC rules, however there is also value in conversation with other developers, and hearing their opinions on the rules. I’d like to share my opinions over the Object Calisthenics ruleset.
Aug 22, 2025
Transitioning to a career in Software Development is a lucrative idea to many people. Programming jobs often allow flexibility in their positions such as offering remote work, are highly sought after by companies from any field or sector, and of course, their paychecks are a nice chunk of change. One of the most common modern-day methods of learning programming is via a bootcamp. Their fast paced, full-throttle curriculum and flashy guarantees of “Get a Dev Career in Just Three Months!” make for a very alluring opportunity. After all, most people who are looking to transition into a new career already have a packed schedule, like family obligations and their current job, or a desire to quickly find employment.However, bootcamps are still an investment and come at a cost. Many bootcamps supplement their short amount of time with a hefty price tag, and it can be hard to justify the expense. Even with their accelerated pace of study, bootcamps still take a time commitment that can disrupt your schedule and demand hours of your attention. This may leave you wondering - “Is a bootcamp right for me?”
Aug 08, 2025
Just One Feature Let’s say you have a website written in HTML, and you’d like to add a comments section to it and allow for more interactive features in the future. One option is to use a javascript framework like Vue or React. To implement the comments feature, all you need to do is choose a build tool, install a bunch of libraries, set up the project using a project template, and somehow integrate it with your existing website.
Jul 25, 2025
Introduction It was Friday afternoon on the last sprint of the quarter. After months of stakeholder meetings, demos, experimentation, and testing, we deployed at 4:00 PM. By 4:05, we wished we hadn’t. An unhandled edge case in a last-minute revision sparked an hours-long production fire that affected promotional payment processing, costing the company tens of thousands of dollars in lost sales from frustrated customers.
Jun 27, 2025
From Extended Cognition to Peripheral Cognizance Most of us already extend our thinking into the tools we use. Alarms nudge us awake and remind us to take meds or do chores. We set calendar notifications for meetings we might otherwise forget. GPS recalculates when we miss a turn. These are everyday examples of extended cognition—our minds stretching into our devices.
Jun 13, 2025
For decades, we’ve been shackled—quietly and obediently—to operating systems. They promised order, organization, and access. They gave us desktops, dashboards, and docked icons. They also locked us into their structures, demanded obedience to syntax, to sequences of clicks and keystrokes that said: “Use it our way.”
May 23, 2025
Prologue: CTRL+ALT+Beginnings I am a proud, card-carrying member of the Oregon Trail generation, aka the “Xennials.” Navigating the freshly forged trails from the analog world into the digital, my formative years were a heady mix of floppy disks, batch files, and wide-eyed wonder. I was fortunate to grow up in a school system that was embracing the advent of the personal computer. When the elementary school got a batch of Commodore PET PCs I begged to go play with them at each opportunity. They were way more interesting to me than crayons or clay.
May 09, 2025
Ah, the age-old question that looms large for every developer staring down a legacy codebase: to rewrite or to refactor? It's a choice that can lead to triumph, or a lot of extra coffee and regret. Let's unpack the nuances of this into this critical crossroads of software development.
May 02, 2025
In a previous article, I wrote about how separating Flutter views into distinct layers helps us create more robust and joyful mobile apps. If you missed that post, you can read it here: A Clever Way to Structure Flutter Apps. Today, I’ll build on that by walking through how I handle forms.
Apr 25, 2025
What is Software Discovery? Product discovery is a challenging but vital first step in the software lifecycle. You can compare a discovery study to surveying land and drawing a blueprint before a building project. While it’s possible to dig a hole and pour a foundation without a plan, the building isn’t likely to go very well.
YOUR NEXT DECISION
Tell us what's slowing you down, what you've tried, and what needs to be different. We'll start there.
Come with a problem. You don't need a specification.
The first conversation helps define the next step, whether or not that step is with us.