~$ ls ~/blog

The Blog

Thoughts on software engineering, DevOps, and lessons learned from an unconventional career path.

I Wrote the Lesson Down on Day One. It Still Cost Me Twenty-Six Days.

Apple pulled Feastmark from review on August 2nd. Twenty-six days and fourteen builds later I resubmitted it, and the bug that ate the most of that time was one I had already diagnosed, written up, and declared fixed — twice.

ios swift app-store share-extension +3

August 28, 2026

Case Study 8 min read

Apple's Uploader Wanted an Icon Size That Doesn't Exist

"Missing app icon. iMessage-only apps must include an asset catalog with a large app icon" — eight uploads rejected with a 409 for a 1024x1024 the .stickersiconset schema has no slot for and actool refuses to emit. What the check actually reads, and the workaround that got the build through.

ios xcode app-store-connect imessage +2

August 6, 2026

Case Study 2 min read

Nine Months of Nights and Weekends Ends With an App Store Link

PayoffPilot cleared App Review and is live on the App Store — the payoff after nine months of nights and weekends, for an app that, by design, can't tell me if anyone's actually opening it.

app-store ios big-beard-apps payoffpilot +2

August 4, 2026

Case Study 7 min read

The Upload Wasn't Slow. It Never Connected.

A GitHub Actions deploy to Hostinger died three times in seventeen minutes and I read the log backwards. The two-minute gap I blamed on a slow archive was a TCP handshake failing in silence, and no faster transfer would have fixed it.

devops ci-cd github-actions networking +3

August 3, 2026

Case Study 7 min read

The Model Didn't Hallucinate. It Read the Wrong 2,000 Characters.

A recipe import came back with one ingredient and no oven temperature. The obvious diagnosis was a hallucinating LLM. The actual bug was two lines of scraper written years before the model ever saw the page.

ai llm web-scraping debugging +2

August 2, 2026

Case Study 6 min read

What Shipping With No Analytics Actually Costs

Four iOS apps, zero analytics SDKs, and no idea what anyone does inside them. Why working alone is what makes that refusal possible — and the specific things it takes away.

privacy ios analytics big-beard-apps +1

August 1, 2026

Career 5 min read

Learning to Code at 40: What No Bootcamp Tells You

I started at 40, with a full-time job and two kids. Ten years later, the thing I'd tell someone starting now isn't about aptitude — it's about what the tutorials quietly leave out.

career-change self-taught learning software-engineering

July 30, 2026

Career 6 min read

What Real Estate Taught Me About Debugging Production Issues

The transferable skill from brokering real estate isn't staying calm under pressure. It's holding someone's confidence while you're blocked on a queue you don't control.

career-change incident-response real-estate devops

July 30, 2026

Case Study 7 min read

Four Apps at Apple at Once, and What That Cost

Three apps in App Store review, one in TestFlight, one solo developer with a day job and two kids. What actually broke was not the code. It was the marketing site, and the one bug that no automated check could see.

app-store ios big-beard-apps solo-dev +1

July 29, 2026

Case Study 7 min read

Building PayoffPilot: Nine Months of Nights and Weekends

The real story behind my privacy-first iOS debt payoff app: an idea in January 2024, a first commit in October 2025, and what it actually takes to finish a side project while learning a new job.

ios-development swiftui swiftdata privacy +2

July 28, 2026

Tutorial 6 min read

CI/CD Best Practices for Enterprise Teams

Lessons from building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines at Dell Technologies — what works, what doesn't, and the mistakes that taught me the most.

ci-cd devops jenkins kubernetes +1

January 29, 2026

Tutorial 4 min read

Getting Started with HashiCorp Vault: A Practical Guide

Learn the fundamentals of HashiCorp Vault for secrets management, from basic concepts to your first working implementation.

hashicorp-vault devops security secrets-management +1

February 20, 2024

Career 4 min read

From Real Estate to Software Engineering: My Unconventional Path

How I went from a 15-year real estate career to software engineering at Dell Technologies — starting over at 40.

career-change self-taught software-engineering personal-growth +1

January 15, 2024

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