My story
My path to software engineering started at age 10, begging my father for a computer almost nobody had at home. He came back from Radio Shack with a Tandy 1000 HX and a DOS programming book. I have been writing code for the 40 years since.
Before software became my profession, I spent six years in the US Army as a satellite systems team chief, deployed from the Middle East to the Balkans, keeping communications alive through the sky while the world went digital back home.
I left the Army in 2001, straight into the wreckage of the burst dot-com bubble. People laughed when I said I was going to school to become a software engineer. Software was "over." It was exactly the right time. That taught me the lesson I keep relearning: the hype never matches what actually ships, and the real building starts when the noise dies.
Twenty years of shipping later, that lesson has held through every wave. Now I write about AI the same way I learned to at that Tandy: what actually works in production, what it really costs, and what it means for engineers and their careers. And I do something most commentators will not. I make specific, dated predictions and grade them in public, hits and misses alike.
If you are an engineer or engineering leader trying to separate AI signal from AI noise, follow along on LinkedIn.