Virtual Andy

Software engineers don’t just inherit systems, they inherit the constraints that shaped them. This post explores what I call Architecture Grief: the process of coming to terms with the reality that systems are shaped by constraints that cannot simply be engineered away, and how the five stages of grief provide a surprisingly useful framework for understanding architecture maturity.

My H1 2026 notes on AI coding assistants: where they make me faster, and where software engineering is still very human work.

My review of Software Engineering: After the Vibe Shift, a short book that is more about durable engineering judgment than vibe coding.

A snapshot of how I was using AI coding tools in August 2025, what changed, and where they were actually helping me.

The start of my data archival project: too many old drives and SD cards, and a plan to finally consolidate them.

A short update pointing to a couple of things I had just published.

My 2024 Cloud Insight Index writeup, looking through public AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure incidents and what stood out.

A career update about joining Lambda Labs and getting back into virtualization, Linux, GPUs, HPC, and SDN work.

Why I moved this site away from WordPress.com and what the migration looked like.

A look at GitOps tradeoffs that can make operational work harder when the model is applied too broadly.