💥 Breaking distributed systems, observing them fall apart with OpenTelemetry, then teaching AI agents to fix them. 🧑💻 Principal Software Engineer @ Microsoft. 📍 Melbourne. Opinions my own, bugs probably also mine.
I’ve spent 20+ years building software, from low-level systems to cloud-native distributed architectures. These days I’m deep in the world of AI agents, exploring how we secure them, authenticate them, and collaborate with them to build better software. This blog covers that journey along with distributed systems, .NET, and all things engineering.
Practical patterns for getting reliable results out of AI coding agents, covering context engineering and manufacturing backpressure in agent harnesses.
I’ve been exploring hypervelocity engineering workflows with AI agents like GitHub Copilot, and one fundamental challenge continues to surface: maintaining shared context alignment between developers and AI. While AI excels at generating code, it lacks inherent “memory” of past interactions and the nuanced understanding that humans naturally build over time. This alignment gap grows wider as projects become more complex, yet having a structured approach to bridge this divide is often overlooked. How can ...
I had the opportunity to speak at DDD Melbourne 2026 about something that has consumed a lot of my thinking over the past year: how we actually get reliable results out of AI coding agents on real, messy codebases. The talk was titled “Throw Away The Vibes: Context Engineering Is All You Need,” and it distilled the practical lessons I have gathered while working on hypervelocity engineering workflows.
Many of us experience an intoxicating high the first time we use an AI coding agent. The “Hello World” ...
Coding agents can produce a lot of code quickly. That is useful, but it also creates a simple problem: how do you know the work is correct before the agent moves on? Backpressure gives the harness a way to slow the agent down when the work has not been proven yet.
A story about what it really takes to send someone to do a job for you, and why that turns out to be a genuinely hard problem we’re now being forced to solve because of AI agents.
Prefer to click through it? There’s an interactive presentation of this post that walks through the same story slide by slide.
AI agents are software that doesn’t just answer questions, it goes off and does things for you: books the flight, files the expense, orders the groceries, emails the client. The moment software starts...
In this 3 part series we will look at what event sourcing is and why enterprise software for many established industries use this pattern.
Index
Part One (This one)
Introduction to Event Sourcing
Why Use Event Sourcing?
Some Common Pitfalls
Part Two
Getting Familiar With Aggregates
Event Sourcing Workflow
Commands
Domain Event
Internal Event Handler
Repository
Storage & Snapshots
Event Publisher
Part ...
In this 3 part series we will look at what event sourcing is and why enterprise software for many established industries use this pattern.
Index
Part One
Introduction to Event Sourcing
Why Use Event Sourcing?
Some Common Pitfalls
Part Two
Getting Familiar With Aggregates
Event Sourcing Workflow
Commands
Domain Event
Internal Event Handler
Repository
Storage & Snapshots
Event Publisher
Part Three (Thi...
