Blog

This is a blog about software engineering, consulting, coffee and other things that I find interesting.

2025

What to write on LinkedIn

I've been on LinkedIn from the beginning but I still have no idea what I'm suppose to write on the platform.

#consulting

Photos: Southern California Spring Break

We just returned from our spring break in Southern California. Here are a collection of my favorite photos from the trip.

#photos

Big Little Cities progress

Making good progress on our second t-shirt company, Big Little Cities. Our latest updates are samples, photoshoot and finishing up the website.

#t-shirts

How to manually deploy a .Net WebApi project

This blog post is about how to manually deploy a .Net WebApi project to a live server without using an CI/CD.

#dotnet

Duplicating Code

A reflection on why I'm not creating a reusable component for a new feature.

#consulting

Be someone who gets things done...with AI

There is a general sense that as AI creeps more into software development, coders are going to lose their identities as developers. I see this as it helping my identity as someone who gets things done.

#consulting

Find Broken Instagram Embed Links

With the help of ChatGPT I wrote a Python script that iterates through a website's sitemap to report which Instagram embeds are broken.

#python

Manuel Vallecillo from Verve ⭐

The first five-star coffee of my journal—smooth, chocolatey Honduran that made wonderful cortados and flat whites once dialed in.

#coffee #coffee-journal #verve #honduras

You're Not A Senior Engineer Until You Break Production

A lot of people ask what makes you a senior engineer. My opinion is that you're not a senior engineer until you break production and then have to fix it while the company watches.

#c-sharp

Why Legacy .Net Projects Fail

This blog post is about why I see so many legacy .Net projects fail or have become abondoned by their original developers or agencies.

#c-sharp

How to display a custom icon in React Native Mapbox

It took me a while to figure out how to add a custom icon to a marker in React Native Mapbox library. This is how you do that.

#react-native

Move from React Native Maps to Mapbox

As I added more and more coffee shops to MPLS Coffee I noticed a huge performance hit with React Native Maps. I updated the entire app to use Mapbox and it's so much faster.

#react-native

S.K. Guatemala Huehuetenango

A Guatemalan coffee that made excellent pour overs but gave me trouble on espresso—some coffees just prefer one brew method.

#coffee #coffee-journal #s-k-coffee #guatemala

Starting a T-Shirt Company...Again

It's been over seven years since I ran and operated a retail t-shirt shop. Today we are starting a new venture t-shirt company.

#writing

Five Years On ooh.directory

Today marks the fifth year that my website/blog has been on the ooh.directory

#writing

Bella Vista from Verve

A Latin American coffee with cherry, hazelnut, and dark chocolate notes—redeemed the new year after machine maintenance fixed extraction issues.

#coffee #coffee-journal #verve #latin-america

Creating a WordPress Redirect Login Plugin

I'm developming a WordPress plug in that will automatically redirect a user to a website when they log into the WordPress site or visit the home page after logging in.

I Learned a Lesson in CI/CD Permissions

I completely obliterated user privileges on a client folder while trying to implement CI/CD using Azure DevOps. My goal was to set up an Angular front-end build and deploy pipeline but instead I bricked the site.

Primary Constructors in C# 12

I’ve come across Primary Constructors, a powerful new feature that simplifies how we define and initialize classes. This feature enables us to declare constructor parameters directly within the class definition, streamlining code and reducing boilerplate

Good Coding Vibes

There’s something that just feels good when you start to write a nice chunk of code. The entire process sets me into a flow state.