DM

In the world of AI assisted engineering, there’s often a high emphasis on productivity and rapid delivery. A question that I hear frequently is around ROI – how can we quantify the spend on agentic approaches and the outcomes they enable? How do we actually know if we’re seeing the promised impact? At its core, engineering management is about balance. If you move too fast, quality drops. If you focus solely on quality, delivery stalls.

As part of driving the adoption of AI assisted engineering, I’ve been thinking about more than just the tooling – I’ve been considering how we structure our solutions so they give AI the best possible chance of completing work successfully, while keeping token usage optimal by ensuring its context is as tight and focused as possible. This won’t suit everyone’s use case, but there are a few patterns that emerge which allow you to move quickly if you can apply them, especially when you lean into a consistent structure across the stack.

Diagnosing issues in .NET projects can get messy fast. Between checking runtime versions, scanning project files, digging through environment variables, and figuring out what your Git state even is, it’s all too easy to miss something important. dotnet-bugreport is a lightweight command-line tool designed to make that process painless. It gathers all the useful diagnostic information about your .NET environment and project in one go, packaging it neatly into a Markdown file you can paste directly into GitHub issues.

I’ve always operated this site on a shoestring budget, taking advantage of every free offering I can find and paying for the cheapest nameserver possible.

Recently, I decided to update the site by migrating to Hugo so I could add this blog section. The setup I’ve landed on is pretty elegant, and I thought it might be worth sharing.

I was recently invited to be involved in the day 2 keynote at GitHub universe. I’d asked to be considered for speaking opportunities, but wasn’t expecting to go straight to the main stage! It was a fantastic experience, and I learnt a lot about what goes on behind the scenes to put on a production of that scale. You can see my talk here with Martin - we decided on a conversational style to keep it snappy.