Another Dev's Two Cents

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Engineering

A collection of 15 issues

On the DORA 2025 AI Report - AI Adoption and use

The DORA State of AI Assisted Software Development report came out recently. It's a massive 142 page report that details analysis done by the DORA team. It captures trends and observations covering a 5000 participant study that focuses on AI Adoption and tool use in the Software industry.

Notes on the phi-4-reasoning Technical Paper

Phi-4 Reasoning Microsoft recently released the phi-4 reasoning model as well as its technical report. They explore using supervised finetuning as well as synthetic dataset curation to train phi-4 a 14B parameter model to compete with and often outperform significanly larger models such as DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B. We present Phi-4-reasoning, a 14-billion

On Ghost Engineers And Proof or a Lack thereof

I've been watching the media landscape evolve in real time and I feel compelled to share my opinion. I'm not a researcher or journalist, but I have been in Engineering for a long time. I don't intend for this to be an attack on

RAG is not just text

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is a common pattern in AI-powered apps that allows a model to generate completions using context data that might not have been available during training. It's beneficial when working with large language models because it helps the model make inferences on private data such

I made a Mastodon bot with GoToSocial

I've been running my own GoToSocial ActivityPub server for a while and it's been great. It's Mastodon compatible, super easy to set up and works well as a single-account server despite being in alpha. 👋 Thanks for reading. If you like my work, leave a

Being busy is not the same as being productive

Being busy means having a lot to do. This stands in contrast to being productive, which measures effectiveness towards a purpose. Productivity efficiently utilizes time to accomplish set priorities. It requires clarity of purpose and the ability to discern the relative importance of work that needs to be done. It&

Effective Resume Tips - Showcasing your value

I frequently receive requests for resume advice from a diverse range of job seekers, including recent college graduates, boot camp attendees, and seasoned developers. While I often share tips verbally, I've recently realized that I haven't documented these insights. While there is no shortage of resume

It's 2023. Your API should have a schema

Here's a story you might find relatable. We kicked off a new integration project that started 3 months later than everyone wanted. APIs just shipped after a bunch of delays. We were handed API docs and a test environment and started work building out the new feature. The

On AI-assisted Software Development

It is not every day we get new tools that have the potential to change the very nature of our jobs. If you haven't been following advancements in the AI scene, new Large Language Models (LLM), most notably GitHub's Copilot, Codex, and ChatGPT are beginning to

What is a Staff Engineer?

"I've worked with a couple of Staff Engineers on different teams in the past and I've seen them do different things, but I've not been able to pin down exactly what they do." I get this question quite frequently. Sometimes from engineers