Stories and writing from Substack.
August 20, 2026
Nine of the tenI have two machines and an AI assistant on each. The one at home had more experimentation on it, because I had run more full development cycles through it. The work assistant I had adopted more judiciously, on the product I was working on, and it had less knowledge…
August 12, 2026
A client’s Shopify storefront sends orders to a dropship manufacturer. Two things were wrong with that integration, and a request to fix one provided me the bandwidth to fix both.The ask was to fix cancellations. The cancellation integration had been part of the design and …
August 10, 2026
I had just added transformations to webhook captures, and I wanted to see how far that went on its own. A webhook lands in FlurryPORT, you reshape it on the way through, and it leaves looking like whatever the next system expects. That is a lot of plumbing to hand somebody, and I…
August 5, 2026
Last night one of my AI agents finished a cleanup in FlurryPORT and handed me one instruction: remove the old routing binding.Reasonable words. It got them from my own MCP implementation. I built the product it was talking about, and I still opened the wrong tab. The closest thin…
July 9, 2026
Model Context Protocol (MCP) seems like a simple enough task to achieve. You already have an API for your application that your UI uses, recycle relevant pieces through code re-use and wrap them nicely for AI to digest. An AI digesting MCP implementation should just know to re…
June 19, 2026
In our last post, Listen and Learn, we made an unusual argument. Before you write a line of webhook-handling code, send a lookout up to the crow’s nest. Let AI spy the hooks coming in, intact, the real headers, the real payloads, the strange edge cases your provider swears …
June 16, 2026
In the past when starting a project against a well documented API I would scour the docs and cherry pick the services and webhooks that I felt were most relevant for my application. My goal would be to touch the smallest subset of features necessary and get out of external code q…
June 10, 2026
In the last post I described setting up Shopify order fulfillment for a former colleague’s store — the undocumented partner API, the offshore go-live, the request to test through production. This is the part of the story I’m less proud of.Confession: I turned of…
June 6, 2026
A while back I set up order fulfillment for a former colleague’s Shopify store. On paper it’s the well-trodden path: read the docs, subscribe to the webhook topics, write a service that stores incoming orders idempotently, hand them off to the manufacturer’s sys…
February 17, 2024
About three months ago I started playing around with AI in more of a recreational fashion. Adoption of AI into my work flow was slow at first, but as I gave it a chance in helping me understand technologies and concepts I found it to be a valuable tool. My core focus…
February 5, 2024
The smoke of a cheap cigar drifted across Ros’s nostrils. She stirred slightly, but was not fully awake. In the distance she could hear the shuffling, dealing of cards accompanied by the twang and clink of credits on a makeshift card table.“Ah, a mighty ha…
January 10, 2024
Maintenance accessways were always next to and parallel to public bulkheads. The accessways were accessible through two doors allowing for the ability to traverse between compromised sections of the station without exposing safe ones. The tandem doors worked mechanically ensurin…
January 5, 2024
Emerging from Stu’s apartment was a bustle of activity as inhabitants evacuated the Solar Solarium. There was an interesting blend of frantic individuals mixed with the calm less concerned looks from Stu’s neighbors. Blendburg Borough, Stu and Roz’s neighb…
January 1, 2024
The actual name of the La’zen was not known. In some of the older passages or corridors of the station could be found the letters that, perhaps, provided the full name of the station, but most inscriptions were faded and worn out. In almost all cases the letters…
December 29, 2023
The sleek stranger shifted his stance slightly producing a squeak as rubber boots dragged across the smooth surface of the floor. With dark pooling eyes, long spider-like eyebrows the man stated: “What is this? How long have you been here?”Roz and Stu looked at …
December 27, 2023
Ambient blue light came from a mostly closed door. The scent of burnt plastic could be smelled from outside and a thin line of smoke wafted out of the apartment. Inside, kneeled over a pile of gears and wires, could be found a male looking to be a few years younger th…
December 25, 2023
Roz’lin was fond of her sanctuary, the bay that now moored a crimson ship. She took care to not be followed whenever she visited. Not knowing when the sleek owner would return she slipped beneath a grate, entered a maintenance tunnel, dropped down a few decks and slithere…
December 24, 2023
Engines hum as an adjustment in altitude is routinely made by a mechanical giant orbiting an inhabitable, yet desolate planet. Creaking and popping of plating and bulwark expand and contract due to temperature changes as portions of the station shift between light and dark…
December 20, 2023
Playing with Chat GPT and getting it to respond in using a scene of three characters got me thinking on how those characters might look like. I decided that the characters would be a fun thing to try using Chat GPT’s counterpart Dall-E. With the base character d…
October 31, 2023
I’ve played with getting Chat GPT respond differently a couple of times. Today I was extremely excited to see a prompt for me to set “Custom instructions” in my session with Chat GPT. The instructions indicate that you can give you can inform Chat G…