The Setup: What Actually Changed in Las Vegas Six months have passed since AWS re:Invent 2024, and I’ve watched the usual cycle play out. The keynote slides got shared. The benchmarks made the rounds. The sales teams got their new talking...
The State of Play: Two Very Different Trajectories We’re now deep enough into 2026 that we can stop treating Cursor and Windsurf as interchangeable contenders. They’ve matured into distinctly different products serving subtly different developer archetypes, and pretending otherwise does both...
The Thing That Actually Works I’ve been skeptical of most AI coding assistants for longer than I care to admit. I watched the hype cycle play out, saw the demos that made everything look effortless, and then spent weeks with actual...
The Problem Nobody’s Really Solved Yet If you’ve spent the last five years trying to run a distributed SQL database across multiple regions without losing your mind, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The moment you need your data in...
The Pricing Theater at re:Invent 2025 I sat in the Venetian last December watching Andy Jassy announce yet another round of S3 price cuts. The room erupted. On the surface, it looked like AWS was finally capitulating to competitive pressure from...
The Release That Quietly Changed the Game When Anthropic shipped Claude 3.7 Sonnet in February 2025, the extended thinking mode didn’t arrive with the usual fanfare. No grand keynote. No breathless marketing. Just a technical capability that lets the model reason...
The Problem I’ve Been Living With For the last three years, I’ve watched AI coding assistants get incrementally better at generating code, but there’s been a persistent gap between what they output and what I’m willing to merge into production. The...
The Day REST Started Feeling Heavy I remember the exact moment I knew REST had lost its grip on microservices communication. We were debugging a cascade failure across twelve services, and I was staring at JSON payloads flying between systems at...
I was reviewing a CI/CD pipeline last week that took forty-three minutes to run unit tests on a medium-sized Node.js application. The team was proud of their “comprehensive automation.” When I dug deeper, I found they were rebuilding Docker images from...
The 73% Problem I’ve been watching platform engineering teams for the better part of a decade, and what I’m seeing in 2026 isn’t sustainable. The Puppet State of Platform Engineering 2026 report landed on my desk last month with a statistic...
