Five Years of Full-Stack Development: What I'd Tell My Younger Self
From early career missteps to building enterprise systems — the lessons that took the longest to internalize.
Writing on software design, company building, and the aerospace industry.
All of my long-form thoughts on programming, leadership, product design, and more, collected in chronological order.
WebAssembly in 2026: Where It's Actually Useful for Web Developers
WASM has matured past the hype. Here are the specific use cases where it's genuinely the right tool.
The Real Cost of Technical Debt: A Case Study
A deep dive into a codebase I inherited — what the debt looked like, how we quantified it, and the refactor roadmap.
Predictions for Full-Stack Development in 2026
What I'm watching: edge-first architecture, AI-native apps, and whether the JavaScript ecosystem finally consolidates.
2025 Year in Review: Full-Stack Development at the AI Inflection Point
A reflection on how AI tooling, new frameworks, and shifting client expectations reshaped software engineering this year.
When AI Writes the Boilerplate: Rethinking How We Onboard Codebases
AI-assisted coding is changing how fast developers ramp up. How I've adapted my documentation and onboarding approach.
The Founding Engineer Mindset: What I Learned Starting Chimpanzee Solutions
Switching from senior IC to founder means thinking differently about every technical decision. Here's what shifted.
Mobile-First Performance: What Makes React Native Apps Feel Native
Concrete techniques — list virtualization, navigation optimizations, JS thread offloading — that actually move the needle.
Shopify Functions vs. Custom Apps: Choosing the Right Extension Point
With Shopify Functions maturing, here's a decision framework for when to extend natively vs. build a full custom app.
React Server Components in Production: Six Months In
An honest retrospective on using RSCs in a real enterprise app — the wins, the footguns, and the caching surprises.
Designing Systems That Scale: Lessons From Enterprise Projects
Patterns I've repeated across multiple high-growth clients — from schema design to API contracts to team handoffs.
GPT-4.1 and Claude 3.7: What Changed for Developers
New frontier models ship with longer context, better code generation, and tool use improvements — practical implications for product builders.
Building with AI Agents: What's Real vs. Hype in 2025
After a year of agent frameworks (LangChain, AutoGPT, crew.ai), here's an honest assessment of what's production-ready.
Vercel vs. AWS: When to Outgrow Managed Hosting
At some scale, serverless platforms become a bottleneck. A practical look at when and how to make the move.
React Native's New Architecture: Performance Wins and Migration Pain
The JSI/Fabric/TurboModules new arch is now default in RN 0.74+. Here's what the upgrade actually looks like.
The Rise of TypeScript-First Backends: Why I Stopped Fighting It
With tRPC, Prisma, and Zod maturing together, going all-in on TypeScript across the stack finally makes sense.
Year in Review: The Full-Stack Patterns That Actually Held Up in 2024
A personal audit of the tech choices made this year — what worked, what didn't, and what I'd do differently.
Next.js 15: What's New and Should You Upgrade Now?
Next.js 15 shipped with breaking changes around caching and async APIs. Here's a migration rundown from the trenches.
Building AI-First Features Without Going Overboard
Reflections on integrating AI (LLMs, embeddings, search) into real products — and where most teams go wrong.
State Management in 2024: Do You Even Need Redux Anymore?
With Zustand, Jotai, and React Query maturing, here's an honest breakdown of when to reach for what.
The Shopify Hydrogen 2.0 Shift: What It Means for Headless Commerce
Hydrogen's evolution toward Remix-based architecture changes how enterprise Shopify stores should be built.
Why I Switched From REST to tRPC in My Next.js Projects
A practical look at end-to-end type safety, and when tRPC makes sense over a traditional REST API layer.
Apple Intelligence: What Developers Should Actually Build For
Apple's WWDC 2024 introduced on-device AI. A look at what this means for React Native and iOS-adjacent development.
OpenAI's GPT-4o and the New Era of AI-Powered UIs
With GPT-4o dropping in May 2024, here's how to think about integrating real-time AI into web and mobile products.
React 19 Is Coming: What Full-Stack Developers Need to Know
React 19 was announced with Server Actions, the new compiler, and the use() hook — here's what it means for your Next.js apps.
Next.js App Router Migration: What the Docs Don't Cover
I've migrated three enterprise apps from Pages Router to App Router. The routing change is the easy part. The hard parts are caching behavior that will surprise you, subtle Server/Client component bugs, and convincing a team mid-sprint.
React Native at Scale: The Decisions That Will Haunt You Later
The architectural choices that seem fine on day one — navigation libraries, state shape, module structure — become load-bearing walls you can't move. Here's what I'd lock in early based on building apps that actually shipped.
What Nobody Tells You About Enterprise Shopify Development: Lessons from Enterprise E-commerce
Three years of building high-revenue Shopify stores taught me that the hard problems aren't technical — they're about API rate limits at 2am, metafield hell, and clients who want everything in one theme. The real lessons.