In my previous article about treating architecture documentation as a first-class asset, I had a great discussion in the comments about enforcing architectural rules. I promised to share materials from my recent Google Developer Groups workshop. The workshop is now finished! Here is the story of how I built an AI Quality Gate, how it helped me solve the internal "CEO, CTO, CFO, CISO" conflict, and
In my previous article, I documented how I installed Terraform on macOS using Homebrew and fixed a Zsh autocomplete issue. In this article, I am going to be using terraform to provision, update, and destroy a simple set of infrastructure using the sample configuration provided by hashicorp The goal is to understand the basic Terraform workflow: Write configuration Authenticate to Google Cloud Ini
We had ArgoCD running perfectly. Every deployment was reconciled from Git. Drift detection worked. Rollbacks were one-click. Our GitOps setup was clean. Developers still couldn't provision a staging environment without pinging the platform team. That gap — between "GitOps in place" and "developers can actually self-serve" — is where most platform engineering teams get stuck. GitOps solves a real p
On April 30th I got an email from Google about something called GEAR, their new program for building AI agents using ADK, the Agent Development Kit. I signed up, watched the intro video, and had a strange feeling of recognition. The pattern was familiar. Define tools. Write descriptions. Connect an AI model to those tools. Let the model decide which tool to call based on what the user asks. I buil
VotePath -- an AI-powered multilingual voting guide for first-time voters. The Problem: Why Don't People Vote? What is VotePath? 🤖 Gemini-Powered AI Assistant: A conversational AI built with the Google Gemini API that answers specific election queries in real-time. 🛠️ The Tech Stack Building the UI components and wiring up the Gemini SDK went smoothly using an intent-driven development approach.
For years, the dream of a truly autonomous, always-on AI assistant has felt just out of reach — a concept relegated to-fi or limited by fragile, stateless nature of most chat interfaces. We’ve grown accustomed to assistants that forget us the moment we close the browser tab. But what if we could change the fundamental architecture? What if we could build an AI agent that doesn't just converse, but
Anthropic now ships at least three different memory models inside the Claude product family, and they don't behave the same way. Claude.ai has a chat memory feature for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise users that summarizes prior conversations and injects that summary into new chats. Claude Code has CLAUDE.md files plus a separate "auto memory" directory the model writes to itself, both loaded at se
Part 2 of 5 in The New Engineering Contract - what it means to lead engineers when AI is doing more of the coding. Stripe never skipped the boring stuff. They ship 1,300 AI PRs a week. Amazon skipped it. Their storefront went down for six hours. Kent Beck wrote the answer in Extreme Programming Explained in 1999. We read it. Then chose velocity anyway. A friend of mine leads engineering at a funde