- Break things.
I have yet to find a better way to learn anything new. "Learning by doing" sounds like it assumes you're doing it well enough, but that's not how it works. A better way to put it would be "learning…
- Discovery isn't finished until you can write this sentence.
This system succeeds when it changes X by Y, measured by Z. For example: Reduces fire-seal pricing time by 90%, measured by average minutes per seal before and after rollout. Reduces subcontractors…
- The customer wanted the whole system. I built one line item first.
"We would like to automate the line item pricing against a rate sheet. Also, there are % uplift with certain work types. Plus we need to calculate labor cost for each item and produce a productivity…
- It worked for three months, then a string became an array.
First time I built an automated construction code referencing integration, it worked perfectly for 3 months, then it broke, item not found in the lookup table. It went like this: An operator opens a…
- Three people tell you they want an integration.
They may be describing three different jobs at three different depths for three kinds of specialist. Data engineer setting up nightly ingest of new contract details from CRM into the data warehouse…
- Learning to program without AI is now more important than ever.
AI handed unprecedented technical power in the hands of people who maybe always wanted to use technology to solve problems but they never had the capacity to actually dive in and become technical.…
- Idempotency — what a word.
I'll admit the first time I saw it was in an AI coding session, and it took me a while to figure out the pronunciation, let alone understand how to apply it. An operation is idempotent when running…
- Executives love a good dashboard.
And for good reasons. A good dashboard can show where revenue is leaking, where costs are running away, where things are slowing down, or where they're breaking. But the dashboard is just the tip of…
- "Can we set up this automation? A report gets auto-generated daily, and emailed to two people."
Friday afternoon. Fifteen-minute job, sure, no problem. Then we started asking questions. And discovered: a single report per project. Many projects. Several different forms and report templates.…
- There's an old dev comic.
Manager (requesting a new feature): When a user takes a photo, the app should check whether they are in a national park. Dev: Sure, easy GIS lookup — give me a few hours. Manager: ...and check…
- This is a conversation I'm having sometimes:
User: Let's add an auto-calculated field into this ticket! Me: Sure, but why? User: You see, at the end of the week we export all this data into an Excel spreadsheet and run a custom calculation…
- File Sync. One of the most talked about and underestimated integration patterns.
Here is a little checklist of questions to answer before you start building. What systems are we syncing? Which system is your single source of truth? One time or ongoing? What is the scope of the…
- I used to teach people English.
Today I taught Claude Code how to create and update triggers in Workato recipes via API. My student was eager — often too eager — jumping two lessons ahead and making wrong assumptions. But with…