Articles
Original writing and migrated articles from previous publishing homes.
Hook a conversational guest platform into digital access and PMS backends without an independent guard, and you've promoted a chatbot to Chief Credential Officer. Put the boundary outside the model.
Blast radius has to be designed, not discovered. What to demand from connected access control: per-device keys, scoped issuers, and a named owner for the offline-door revocation problem.
Why offline locks can't trust the holder of a token — and why that matters even more when the holder is an AI agent or a robot, not a human.
Aliro standardizes the mobile access handshake — but it's silent on where the access decision actually lives. A test for whether your 'Zero Trust' door still trusts the phone.
A story about Ada, Perl, and a promotion at Lockheed Martin — and why AI coding agents put us back in exactly the same spot, just at machine speed.
Your intent gets corrupted twice before an agent ever acts. A four-part blueprint for a guardrail that grades blast radius against reconstructed intent, on a channel the agent can't see.
Sixteen layers of guardrails. Full compliance. Wrong objective. What a sociologist predicted in 1976 about your coding agent — and the missing control category the industry needs to build.
Point an optimizer at a proxy metric and it will destroy the real goal to hit the number. Why mesa-optimization in coding agents needs a Divergence Guardrail — a runtime monitor for intent, not just compliance.
A coding agent told to make the tests pass rewrote the tests instead of fixing the bug — and sailed through all 16 guardrail layers clean. Why compliance-focused guardrails miss goal deviation (OWASP ASI10: Rogue Agents).
Leaders reach for presence management when they lack a system that can see progress. The fix is operating design — not trust, ideology, or more meetings.
A short read on why Microsoft's Claude Code rollout may have been less of a failed experiment and more of an R&D shortcut for improving Copilot.
Practical Claude Code guardrails for blocking dangerous shell commands, protecting secrets, requiring Terraform plan review, and enforcing test checks.
What the Product Engineer owns in 2026: product intent, agent pipelines, testing completeness, compliance, and production outcomes.
Why AI pushes engineering teams beyond ticket velocity and toward ownership of intent, judgment, quality, and delivered value.
A short note on my Journal of Medical Genetics publication about expanded targeted carrier screening and why data-driven family planning matters.
How managers can balance quality, time, budget, and originality when deciding what makes a project worth building differently.
A heavy timber frame built from reclaimed European oak railroad tracks. Hand-cut mortise-and-tenon joinery throughout — material that spent decades under trains, given a second purpose.
A practical look at building Nova, a secure serverless SaaS platform for identity and physical access management, in seven weeks.
A short product planning reminder: features times quality equals time, and changing one side of the equation changes the others.
A live-edge eucalyptus plank from the same fell tree, mounted as a floating shelf on concealed steel pins. Nothing visible from the front.
There are many scenarios that require a UI to be updated with long processes and / or stuff that goes on in the cloud - that require a special polling or infrastructure to communicate the information from the cloud to the browser / client UI. In serverless paradigms, this is a pain as "polling" for [...]
Uploading to S3 is very useful, but requires authorization and/or permissions set on the bucket access, and achieving this from a plain old browser is a pain as it requires the POST to be approved and signed prior to sending it to the bucket. All the implementations I have found require a server side component [...]
A large hand-carved mirror frame from the same fell eucalyptus tree as the bowl, shelf, and coffee table. The relief carving covers the full surround — organic forms cut by hand into the warm orange-red wood.
No process pix, sorry. This started as a piece of firewood, I saw it in a pile of firewood and just had to salvage it. It is Indian Rosewood, and it was beautiful. Indian Rosewood is really hard to carve, but it was worth it all - for it was a present I made with [...]
A massive live-edge slab from a single fell eucalyptus tree, cross-cut to show the full width, finished to reveal deep orange-red heartwood and decades of growth rings.
This was a brazilian hardwood that was leftover from a staircase build - and was thrown for firewood. I had to give it a new purpose All handmade with love 🙂
A bowl made from reclaimed wood from a forest fire we had a few years ago... It is made from North Indian Rosewood
So after doing several scripts for backing up wordpress to various places, and primarily S3 buckets, I figured I better put the script here so it is easier for me to find it the next time, and maybe it will be useful for you too 🙂 “Before you act for the greater good, you should [...]
Garden stairs built from limestone blocks quarried at a quarry Baron Rothschild established around 130 years ago. Long closed, the stone available as salvage — warm, golden, and heavier than it looks.
A hand-shaped bowl from a single eucalyptus tree that came down in the neighbourhood. The warm red-orange grain and the cracks that sealed as it dried.
A hand-carved bowl in North Indian rosewood — over 40cm wide, with a live edge and deep burl figure. Reclaimed from a forest fire. Rosewood is extremely hard; this was entirely by hand.
A serving tray from a Brazilian hardwood staircase off-cut that a neighbour threw away. Exceptionally dense and hard, with an extraordinary flowing grain that a staircase builder could not have cared less about.