Virtual Andy

It’s true: I am a significantly more productive software engineer with AI coding assistants. I’m shipping more complex features, faster. Debugging is faster. My tool set hasn’t changed much since my AI and Software Engineering August 2025 post, but how much I use each tool has changed slightly. I did add Claude’s web interface (2%). Claude/Claude Code (90%), ChatGPT (5%), Cursor(3%). My experience so far hasn’t convinced me software engineering roles will disappear any time soon....

I am not sure how exactly I came across Sean Goedecke’s free book Software Engineering: After the Vibe Shift, but I’m glad I did. Although the word “Vibe” is in the title, the book’s central message is not around vibe coding. It’s about how software engineering changed in a post-Zero Interest-Rate Policy world. The book is focused on Individual Contributors maximizing (or adjusting) their impact in this new world. What I liked: Basically the entire book....

Earlier this year, the AI tools I used for software engineering were Cursor and ChatGPT. I was regularly using Cursor’s autocomplete and agent mode, and ChatGPT for everything else. Since then, the landscape has evolved considerably; here’s my toolset as of August 2025- and roughly how much I use each tool. Claude Code (80%) The CLI claude tool took over as my primary AI tool for software engineering. In my opinion it is the best in class....

I am on a data archival kick these days. I kept all of the drives, SD cards, etc. from every device I’ve owned since as long as I can remember. The collection is large enough that it’s time to consolidate it. Some context: A few years ago, after my mom passed, I got all of our family photos (thousands). I bought a Epson FastFoto FF-640 to scan all of the photos, front and back....

Content I published today: Home Office AWS GCP Azure Incidents 2024 I joined Lambda Labs Happy Hacking!

In early 2024 I started a project called Cloud Insight Index which went through AWS, GCP, and Azure public incident postings and collects information about each incident in 2023. This post is the 2024 edition. See the project’s page for methodology and 2023’s numbers. Unfortunately, AWS/GCP’s incident postings do not go back to January 2023 and I don’t have last year’s dataset so I can’t do a year-over-year comparison across providers....

In November I started a new job as a Senior Software Engineer at Lambda Labs. I am working on Lambda’s Cloud offerings which means I’ll be spending a lot more time with virtualization, Linux, GPUs, HPC, and software defined networking. This is the first job I’ve had where I chose a Linux Laptop (Thinkpad X1 Carbon). My rationale: if the systems I’m deploying to all run on Linux, why not also build directly on Linux?...

After the recent press around Automattic and WP Engine I decided to go ahead and abandon the Wordpress ecosystem entirely. I haven’t been thrilled with Wordpress for a while and the controversy was sort of the straw that broke the camel’s back. This post has some details about how I moved away from Wordpress.com. Challenge I have a very old website. It’s been indexed by search engines and linked to in all kinds of strange places....

GitOps is an idea that entire systems are declaratively specified in code, versioned in Git, and that repositories are a team’s source of truth. There’s some plumbing required that takes the specified code and reconciles the system to that specification. In my experience, GitOps can be taken way too far and end up becoming a hassle. This post discusses some drawbacks of GitOps that I’ve encountered. First: GitOps isn’t awful Before I get into GitOps drawbacks, let me be clear: GitOps-y approaches aren’t always bad....

It’s 2024 so there’s got to be a post about AI. My only perspective about AI is from a consumer’s standpoint. I don’t understand AI much aside from a few basic concepts I learned in a machine learning college course I took in 2019. Mundane Tasks I use both GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT to help me accomplish a some boring mundane tasks. These AI tools are Good Enough for something like reformatting/transforming a CSV to another data format, remembering command line switches, regular expressions, or date string formatting....